Been gone! But back with COMPOSITING

Sorry guys but unfortunetly I’ve been gone for a while because I’m full with exams! I’ve been working on some projects regarding also compositing, so I thought better to send an article regarding it 🙂 There will be a little introduction of the theme and a lot of personal experience! It’s not a Comic book topic, but it’s rather fascinating and I hope you like it! 🙂

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COMPOSITING

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called “chroma key”, “blue screen”, “green screen” and other names. Today, most, though not all, compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation. Pre-digital compositing techniques, however, go back as far as the trick films ofGeorges Méliès in the late 19th century; and some are still in use.

There are different softwares for using it but the one I used for all my works is “After Effects”, from the Adobe package. In my university it’s a subject of its own and I’ve been studying it since this semester. It is also a job, though, if you become a master at using it you may go working in a tv studio, by making ambientations in blue o green screen, or you could take care of the animatics and animated commercials… Otherwise you can work in cinema, by creating special effects and graphic detailes or even work with the production of video games.

Now, my course wasn’t much about the last and more awsome part, but I can still say I’ve learned a lot. My theacher works in a TV studio in Milan, and he gave us a few projects which we develped in a something like 3 months.

Project 1

The first one is about choosing three themes (3 films, 3 music bands, 3 elements of something…) and combine them with main elements in a video of maximum 7 seconds. I chose “The Avengers” (group of comic book super heroes created by MARVEL). I represented their group by the use of elements of three characters: Thor, Captain Amrica and Hawkeye.

 

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Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing

Personal knoledge

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Keep in mind that…

… I’ll be updating more info about COMPOSITING tomorrow! 😉

 

EUROPEAN COMICS: Franco-Belgian comics

And here we are with Comc book-Tuesday! 🙂

 

Get a load of Europe

They’re not as famous as  japanese nor american comics, but European comic books need to be recognised!

The origins of European comics date back to 18th century caricatures and illustrated picture books such as Wilhelm Busch‘ “Max and Moritz”. The early 19th century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer is regarded by many as the “father of the modern comic” and his publication Histoire de M. Vieux Bois is sometimes called the first “comic book”. (for more information ckick here!)

Franco-Belgian comics, Spanish comics, and Italian comics are historically amongst the dominant scenes of European comics. But, in the “European comic book world”, we mustn’t exclude the U. K., Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands,  Luxemburg, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungry, Albania etcetera etcetera… You get it! Every country’s comic book is important 😉

Even thuogh they’re so many, they all have some main characteristics: they present themselves as “comic albums”.

General info

The typical album is printed in large format, generally with high quality paper and colouring, roughly A4-sized, approx. 21×30 centimetres (8.4×11.6 in), has around 40-60 pages, but examples with more than 100 pages are common. While sometimes referred to as graphic novels, this term is rarely used in Europe, and is not always applicable as albums often consist of separate short stories, placing them somewhere halfway between a comic book and a graphic novel. The European comic genres vary from the humorous adventure vein, such as “The Adventures of Tintin” and “Asterix”, especially in its earliest forms, to more adult subjects like “Tex Willer” and “Diabolik”. As for they’re so many we’ll concentrate only on some of them!

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Franco-Belgian comics

Franco-Belgian comics are comics that are created in Belgium and France. These countries have a long tradition in comics and comic books, where they are known as BDs, an abbreviation of bande dessinée (literally drawn strip) in French andstripverhalen (literally strip stories) in Dutch. The Flemish Belgian comic books (originally written in Dutch) are influenced by francophone comics, yet have a distinctly different style. Many other European comics, especially Italian comics, are strongly influenced by Franco-Belgian comics.

Format

Before World War II, comics were almost exclusively published as tabloid size newspapers (Tabloid format measures 432 x 279 mm or 17 x 11 inches). Now, they were sized about half that, which is incredibly more handy. The comics are almost always colored all the way through, and, when compared to American comics, rather large (roughly A4 standard).

Comics are also often published as collected albums, with about 40-50 pages, after the run is finished in the magazine. Lately, most comics are published exclusively as albums and do not appear in the magazines at all.

Styles

There are two distinct styles within the school:

1. The Realistic:
   As mentioned, late Tintin is a classic example of the realistic style. The comics are often laborously detailed, making the pictures interesting to look at for times on end. Another trait is the often “slow” drawings, with little to no speed-lines, and strokes that are almost completely even. It is also known as the Belgian clean line style. This was exhibited in magazines like Vaillant, Tintin, and Métal Hurlant.
2. The Comic-Dynamic:
   This is the almost Barksian line of Franquin and Uderzo. Pilote is almost exclusively comic-dynamic, and so is Spirou and l’Écho des Savannes. These comics have very agitated drawings, often using lines of varying thickness to accent the drawings.

The newer comics don’t really fall into the old styles, and have evolved into something completely different. 

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Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_comics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Belgian_comics

http://www.chriskaw.com/2013/07/the-french-and-their-comics-look-at.html

http://europeisnotdead.com/video/images-of-europe/european-comics/

http://everything2.com/title/The+Franco-Belgian+school+of+comics

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And keep in mind that…

If there is information about some of the abovementioned styles of European comic books you would like to know more about, write a comment! 😉

COMICS

A comic book or comicbook, also called comic magazine or simply comic, is a visual medium used to express ideas via images, often combined with text or visual information.

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Comic book history

According to many experts, the precursors to modern comics were the satirical works of artists like Rudolph Töpffer, Wilhelm Busch, Christopher, or Angelo Agostini (first Brazilian comic artist).

The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck

Töpffer, in 1827, in Switzerland, created a comic strip and continued on to publish seven graphic novels. In 1837, “The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck” was published by Töpffer and it is considered the earliest known comic book. In 1842 it became the first comic book ever published in the United States.

Max und Moritz

 

In 1859, the German poet and artist, Wilhelm Busch published caricatures in the newspaper Fliegende Blätter. In 1865, he published a famous comic called “Max und Moritz“.

Yellow kid

The 1895 “Yellow Kid“, created by Richard Outcaulthas, has often been cited as being the first comic strip. The reason being is that Outcault was the first artist to use the balloon, an outlined space on the page where what the characters spoke was written. However, comic strips and comic books were published before “Yellow Kid” debuted in the New York City newspaper “The World”. Anyway we should also consider that comics theorists and historians have seen precedents for comics in the Lascaux cave paintings in France (some of which appear to be chronological sequences of images), Egyptian hieroglyphs, Trajan’s Column in Rome, the 11th-century Norman Bayeux Tapestry, the 1370 bois Protat woodcut, the 15th-century Ars moriendi and block books, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and William Hogarth’s 17th-century sequential engravings, amongst others

Comics are not only american

The European, American and Japanese comics traditions have followed different paths. Europeans have seen their tradition as beginning with the  Töpffer’s comic strips of the 1830s, while Americans have seen the origin of their tradition in Outcault’s 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid, though many Americans have come to recognize Töpffer’s precedence, as we have already said. Japanese comics, on the other hand, had a long prehistory of satirical cartoons and comics leading up to the World War II era.” Manga”, the Japanese term for comics and cartooning, was first popularized by the artist Hokusai in the early 19th century. It is in the post-war era modern Japanese comics began to flourish, when Osamu Tezuka produced a prolific body of work. Towards the close of the 20th century, these three traditions have converged in a trend towards book-length comics: the comics album in Europe, the tankōbon in Japan, and the graphic novel in the English-speaking countries.

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 Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book http://www.ninthart.com/ http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/comics.htm

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And keep in mind that…

…There are so many types of comic books! In this blog, I will post various articles about them every Tuesday. Plus, if anyone has any requests about some information on artists, their comics, stories, characters or what ever,  write a comment below this article! I will provide you all the information you want! 😉