Storyboarding Basketball

Above is my storyboard for animation. (you can click on it to see it bigger) It's for my community project - I chose to talk and create something that relates to me in my community. When I first started thinking about what I would do for this project, basketball was the first thing to come to mind. I'm talking about how I love to play basketball and how its my thing to do.

For my project, I'm going to make two clay male characters and animate them using stop motion animation. Just to let you know, one of the characters out of the two clay male characters is me and I make the basketball go into the net of the court, all net, at the end of my performance.

Also, something cool about my project is that I will speak a rap to the audience and as the two clay male characters move the rap music I say goes exactly to what the characters are doing regarding movement wise. In the end I look forward to seeing everybody who gets the chance to see my work to say, "Cool", after I, the clay character hits the shot and it swishes threw a clay basketball court.

Digital Comic Strip Finished!

I finished the digital comic strip! I made it with a computer program called Comic Life Deluxe. The program was great. Really interesting to learn.

To see what I'd written before about this project, click HERE.

For the strip, almost all of the images are symbols. The scale is a symbol of the balance and unbalance conflict. Paper money represents wealth and coin represent poverty. The black box in the third image represents the illegal activities of the wealthy people. The person that's kneeling on the broken glass with a no sign means no punishment, stop it. The sick lady laying on bed represents the poor because usually poor people don't have anything to eat and they would be sick and die. The birds flying behind the scale represent peace.

The strip is done. I was shocked by how amazing it looked to me when finished. It was so cool, I never expected it would come out to be this good. I feel really happy right now. This was the first time I've made a comic strip on the computer. Although I did on paper before.

Digital Comic Strip in Progress

I drew this, it's part of the project that I wrote about before on the blog - the comic strip. This image describes the punishment of the wealthy people, kneeling on broken small pieces of glass in 1950's China. Many people died from the punishment and some escaped to the United States. This is how the story ended. I just wanted to put this on the blog to show the progress.

In the other comic I'm working on, I'm imagining a new ending. It's more peaceful.

I drew all the images this week. next week I'm going to scan them into the computer so that I can import them into a really cool program that lets you make digital comic strips.

I can't wait to see the whole thing finished.

Imagining Peace in Comics

When I was 15 my mom told me about the land reform movement in China in the 1950's. I'm now 19. She'd lived in China during that time.

I was interested in the Children of Jerusalem exhibit, which is about the Israeli/Arab conflict and is why I wanted to do conflict resolution for my final project. It was after looking at that show that I started to remember my mom's story. So I decided to do the story that my mom told me because it was related to the Children of Jerusalem, conflict and resolution, and it was happened in the real live and it was took place where I was from, China.

Land Reform is about redistributing arable land, whether previously collectivized by the state or held by rich farmers. The farmers are forced by the government to give up their land at prices thats unfair. Landowners evicted the farmers without their consent, and that's why they were so rich. The goals of Land Reform is to take from the rich and give to the poor, reducing poverty, expanding rural development, or returning land to it's previous owners.

I was inspired by the show of the Children of Jerusalem, and I like the symbols that they used in their paintings. Birds. flags, the colors, wall. mystery, sea.

My thing is that I like comics a lot, so I wanted to make a comic strip. My favorite is Case Closed. So I'm going to draw and make a comic strip about the land reform conflict. I will be also using symbols and some text like what the Israeli and Arab children did for their paintings. First, I will draw it on white paper with pencil, then go over with pen, and color it. Cut it out and paste them on a bigger hard cardboard.

I've already sketched out the two comics. What you see here are those rough sketches. I did two pages, one is the conflict as it happened for real and the other one is how I think it could have ended more peacefully. The conflict is that during the 1950s in China, the people were equal, but the wealthy people made the scale unbalanced. So the government needed to do something about it, and it was to punish the wealthy people by forcing them to kneel on the broken small pieces of glass. Thats what the original ending was. But i want to make an alternative ending to it to make it a peaceful conflict resolution. Instead of punishing them so harshly, I want to free the people and take their money and give it to the poor. So there's no violence and everybody is equal.

I used a scale to show the unbalance of the rich with paper money and a Chinese dollar symbol on it, and poor with only coins. At the end, I will draw white birds flying over the balanced scale to represent peace.

I want to show people that violence can't solve problems. People have to work together to make a resolution. To compromise.