24 Hour Comic Challenge

Here's our challenge for Scott McCloud's 24 Hour Comic Day on Oct 2nd 10am to Oct 3rd 10am held at Norris Hall Savannah College of Art and Design. We didn't know it was this tough and here's some after thoughts from the event. You can read the comic here and we're writing what our story is about because we've got feedbacks of confusion regarding the last part of the story and if you did get what we're trying to tell you we're glad, if not, its really our fault for not doing this better HaHa!!

A little History about the event: the 24 Hour Comic Day started as a challenge from the famous comic artist Scott McCloud who dares his friend to create a 24 page comic within 24 hours after seeing how fast his friend drew. Thats one page per hour trying to tell a complete story from scratch and you're only allowed reference materials. They both make it to the one day challenge at home and were completely surprise by the possibilities of their success; the fact that it is DOABLE to make 24 pages out of 24 hours.

We did this challenge with other students in the school's hall and a professor was so kind to lend us his wacom pen because ours didn't work in the school's cintiq!! ( He didn't even know us OMG... we really need to thank him!!!) Another student whom we knew is Corey who's in our drawing class and we manage to finish it almost exactly at 10am Oct 3rd. We did this from scratch !! ( some students didn't, they came with pre-rendered images) And this exercise is really intense and tiring. ( it gets very tough at the 20th hour when one needs to keep awake while doing work) During the process a lot of others gave up while the remaining crazy freaks like us held on encouraging each other. Of course the school's free donuts, pizzas, drinks and coffee kept us all night long!! Really have to thank the professors who took shifts to come in and look after us bringing all this food!!!!!!!!

The Process: We challenge to ourselves to create a comic that tells good storytelling together with compelling visuals. We decided to take the challenge on using textless words (again) to see how well we can do it under 24 hours. Skipping a lot of process to prepare for the finish piece including character design and thumbnails, we went straight ahead sketching the story and figuring how to can keep the rhythm, pace and flow well. We eventually clean it on Wacom Cintiq 21 UX using photoshop.

The Story, "I Love Art": This story is about an artist who doesn't give a shit about young budding artists and focus more on fame though he feels he is passionate about art. An accident happened and he broke his arm. During his stay in the hospital he is visited by this young boy who wish the artist would review his work. During the examination of his arm the doctor told the artist that his arm is dead (page 16) and the only option left is to cut another arm and attach it to his. (page 17) The boy then appears and says his willing to do it. (page 18) The artist have flashbacks of all the things the young boy did and he doesn't understand it; why does such a passionate boy who never gave up on something he likes is willing to give up his arm? And give it up on him who has rejected the boy over and over again. Then he remembers what the boy say "I love art". ( page 20) Knowing how good the artist is, this boy is willing to sacrifice his arm for the greater good even to the point of giving away what he loves for a bigger cause. The artist didn't go through the operation and finally emerge as the best artist of the year on the following year. And this time round he really did what he did because he love art with the inspiration of the boy. A lot of the things we've explained is not in the comic and we're leaving it to the audience to really catch, feel and interpret what they see. We recognize there's definitely means and ways to make it better (for one, using text and dialog instead of symbols) but we took the challenge trying to tell a story without a "real" dialog. Whether we did it successfully or not doesn't matter, its a learning process. We'll edit this piece later but currently, we're really happy how it turn out within 24 hours. Hopefully you enjoy what we created and do think through about what you're doing in life everyday or at least for the next 24 hours because we really can achieve a lot of things if we decide to commit ourselves.

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