New Media Communication @ Tunxis CC - Spring 2007

Topics for this evening:

• Systems
• Sequences
• Relationships
• Flow

We’re looking at 2Advanced.com. Where is the eye first attracted when looking at the main page there? It’s a non-linear open system.
Is it the old and the new? I think it looks like the little guy on the screen is checking out the big picture.

Oh, and the words are floating over the town, which I’m quite sure means something. And the words do mean something, the words are links which represent paths from the home page.

The 2Advanced site incorporates quite a few of the New Media principles. According to Prof. Ersinghaus, Flash is the new media platform because you can use it to do most anything.

On to Ch. 2 in Understanding Comics. The Icon.

Two types of icons are pictorial and non-pictorial

• Some examples of non-pictorial icons: 1 # w
• Some examples of pictorial icons:

Page 46 in the McCloud book breaks down the progressions that we want to note:

• Complex to Simple
• Realistic to Iconic
• Objective to Subjective
• Specific to Universal

Objective is static, and subjective is flexible or changing–open to interpretation.

Page 51 in the McCloud book has a detailed diagram of the Reality/Language/Picture triangle.

The more iconic, the more we identify with it. The more realistic, the less we identify with it.
—————–
Reading the comic is panel reading. In animation, panels are called cells.

There are six types of transitions between panels:

• Moment-to-moment
• Action-to-action
• Subject-to-subject
• Scene-to-scene
• Aspect-to-aspect
• Non-Sequitur

The panels have to form a narrative.

Narrative — A sequence of events with a cause and effect relationship happening in space and time

There is some suggested action going on outside the panels, between the panels, but we just can’t see it. Time is either progressing or being shown simultaneously.
—————–

Watchmen
From the perspective of this cover, the viewer is involved. We pushed the smiley face out the window (or are involved in whatever way we can infer from the elements of the image).


And there’s a clear passage of time between that image of the cover and this one:


We’re looking at a page with 7 panels. Three panels on the first two rows, and one panel in the third row that spans all three columns. What’s striking (and what was pointed out to us by Prof. Ersinghaus) is that the page is made up of panels, but the page itself is unified as a single panel by the hidden structure.

In future pages, the red tinted panels indicate speculation about past action, and the cooler colored panels indicate action occurring in the present. The action is the detectives speculating about the crime.
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When we’re analyzing, we need to be looking for patterns. Do they tell us about space? Moment to moment?

Stuff for next week:

• Editing
• Hypertext
• Assignment