Honors 295 - Fall 2003 Project 1: Random comics, part 1 Due by email to DD, before class, Oct 1

Description

This assignment asks you to explore storytelling in comics in two steps.

You will use the imagery from The Unstrung Harp: Or Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel the 1953 classic by Edward Gorey. (Republished by Harcourt, 1999.)

The first step is to create two short stories using a collection of frames from the book. We suggest that eight to ten frames might make a reasonable story. But this is up to you.

The second step is to describe the transitions that you used in your stories, according to McCloud's taxonomy.

To do this assignment on your home computer, you will want to download and expand this Win Zip archive. It contains a program that you will extend, along with the artistic images that the program will use. Load the file "goreydisplay.scm" into DrScheme, using the graphical language. (It takes a while because it's uncompressing all the images into full bitmaps.)

[Update: 9/29]: The goreydisplay.scm file needs to be in the same directory as the images; otherwise DrScheme won't find them.

[Update: 9/29]: If you don't have WinZip (or you can't figure that out), then you can download all of the files individually (all 30 images, and the scheme file!) here. If you "shift-click" on each filename, your browser will let you save each one individually.

To do this assignment in the cereal lab, type the following command in your Terminal window to copy the file goreydisplay.scm to your current directory (called . in unix):
         cp /ilab/project/vfam/scheme/goreydisplay.scm .
(You really need that dot at the end, as well as the space before it!) All of the Earbrass images are already there for you. Note that this file is a little different from the one that comes in the Zip file above; look at the comments near gorey-earbrass-list if you plan on working both in the lab, and on your home computer.

This file contains three functions that you can use to create panels in stories:

• (tell STRING) specifies a panel that just involves words. You might use this for a title, conclusion, or change of setting. String should be a short caption enclosed in quotes, for example "The end."
• (show N) specifies a panel that just displays image number N from Gorey's book.
• (show-and-tell N STRING) specifies a panel made up of image N with STRING as a caption.

The file also contains two functions that you can use to interact with a story you have made:

• (tell-story STORY ART) says to go through STORY, which is a list of panels, using ART, which is a list of bitmaps, as the source of images. For example,
           (tell-story auction-story gorey-earbrass-list)
  is the command to use to run through the auction story we went through in class.
• (annotate STORY ART) goes through STORY, transition by transition (again using imagery from ART), and allows you to use a radio-button interface to indicate the kind of transition that you find. At the end of the session, it prints out your sequence of transitions in the interaction window.

[Update: 9/29]: Use this image, which contains all of the pictures in miniature, as a way of figuring out the number associated with each image (as you need to specify them by number in your scheme file!).

Hand in a single file, containing:

• your name
• the scheme commands to define your two stories
• the corresponding lists output from your annotation of your stories (obtained by cut-and-paste from the interaction window).