Assignment 01: Pre-Critique Report

Telling a story in 5 panels

Coming up with a story with merely 5 photographs and absolutely no text proved to be a challenging yet fun-filled task. A lot of time was spent in brainstorming and storyboarding. I wanted to tell a story with a twist to its ending, but with only 5 panels to work with, I also had to make sure that the storyline was short enough to be conveyed in a few images.

So I decided to work on a story about the process of solving a 4x4 Rubik’s cube, an object of fascination I’ve had for a while. I thought about the various unconventional ways people attempt when solving a scrambled cube, but decided to go for a rather less heroic ending where the person gives up at solving the cube.

This was my very first draft:

It was a very simple storyline composed of mostly action-to-action transitions between the first 4 panels that progressively showed the actor’s annoyance with the cube, followed by a moment-to-moment transition at the end where the disheartened actor quits by destroying the cube and leaving the room. I also thought that it would be alright, and rather appropriate, to have square panels for my images because my story was about the Rubik’s cube after all.

Prior to the critique session, however, I showed my work to some of my peers who were not taking module, as I thought that it might be useful to get some feedback from the general viewer who interprets the story from a quick 3-second glance. If I cannot even meet their benchmarks in the first place, I might as well not submit this for a serious critique session *coughs*.

While my friends understood the story, most of my peers felt that it was a rather boring one. In terms of technique, one of my peers also pointed out that the first 4 panels looked dull and unimpressive because they were all shot from the same angle. The lighting also required room for improvement even though I’ve already tweaked some of the exposure and lighting settings in Photoshop. Looks like I would still have to explore other techniques later on too.

More importantly, if I was going to submit an artwork for the critique session, I wanted to make sure that it was close enough to the final piece of work I was confident in. I hope to make minor improvements from there, instead of returning to square one and having to come up with another story again. So I thought about changing the storyline to another unconventional, and less popular way of solving the Rubik’s cube — cheating.

So I worked on my second draft, and decided to submit this for the critique session later on instead:

* The quality of the image I’ve posted on this blog doesn’t look as good as the one I’ve uploaded for submission though. I had to compress the image in order to add it to this blog post.

Anyway, I was really grateful for my peers’ feedback. I thought that the revised storyline was an improvement from my first draft. I’ve also tried other ways to play with the lighting to make the images look brighter than before. Additionally, I changed the title from ‘Rubik’s End’ to ‘Rubik’s Dilemma’ to present the problem my character was facing — If he continued to rotate and twist the cube layers, he is not likely to reach the solution. So he decided to cheat and reach the solution faster by coloring the cube tiles, at the cost of ruining the original colors of the cube.

Submitted this one for the critique session! ☺