The main purpose of the comic that I was going to create was to demonstrate how our lives during the pandemic changed our communication from before lockdown to now in the present. Communication as in between different family households, friend groups and even between strangers as well all changed during the pandemic. I wanted the reader/audience to know that they weren’t alone through the struggles that they have faced during the pandemic when they were trying to come into contact with their friends and family.
I chose to do this comic, or photo essay because it is more convenient for the reader to comprehend and they can read it at their own pace so that they don’t have to be rushed by a slideshow or a video essay that they may not understand straight off the bat. In addition, I did a comic because doing a video essay would be more complex because of how to edit and change the sound of each clip that you may include and I wouldn’t know whether to do a voice over or include others such as my friends in a call. If I were to do a podcast I would’ve not had the time to assemble my friends and find the correct software to share our voices and I don’t exactly have editing software for this type of approach. I couldn’t really attempt a normal photo essay because its harder to have communication as a topic in photos being expressed in different still frames as well as me not having many of my own photos during the pandemic because I rarely went outside and when I did I didn’t record or take photos.
Some of the issues that I had when I was trying to create this comic online was the fact that most of them limited the amount of characters, panels, emotes, poses and other features that you can do without paying money for it. The poses and styles that I wanted to use were mostly all locked due to microtransactions being a need for comic websites.
When I first began my comic I was debating whether to make it more centered around myself or a fictional character or both. I created a set of characters with varying ages such as the “main character” being a high schooler before the pandemic. This would help to put into retrospect how the pandemic affected high school students that want to pass their classes and hang out with their friends after school.
The reason why I had some slides of “myself” at the last few panels is in case there are some of the readers that didn’t fully understand or comprehend what I was trying to accomplish from creating this comic. This also allowed me to include my own incite into the topic of the comic which was communication while expressing what the main objective was as well. When I was originally making the different topics for this comic I went through various changes such as wanting to change from communication to school, gaming or activities that we now do indoors due to the pandemic closing everything down.
After I finished the comic overall I think that I did a decent job, however there are several things that I would’ve probably did different such as adding more scenarios and various communication techniques (discord/social media/video call/voice call). Other scenarios that I would’ve added would be ones including couples, friend groups, family members in the same age range and class group chats. This would also require me to add different people with different backgrounds (ethnic and career wise) which would require more panels as well. In addition, I would’ve incorporated more of myself as the main character so that the reader can feel more involved and related to what I would’ve had to deal with during the pandemic similarly to them.
The specific conditions where people would experience the comic that I made would be on a social media page where they would read this comic and see that they weren’t the only ones that were struggling with talking to others in their class, their family in their household and their friends that may be living near to them. When others can relate to something that you created on a personal level that means that you incorporated many things that are relevant to them as well as grab their attention. Most people look through social media as a way to escape their life and seeing this comic can also remind them that they aren’t the only ones struggling during this time.
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