Today I am going to share about the comic my group and I made to show our understanding of The Age of Exploration. We had a few struggles and some problems but in the end our comic turned out pretty well in my opinion. (A copy of this comic is included at the end).
The first part of this project was learning about the Age of Exploration which summed up was Europeans exploring new land and claiming it for their country and exchanging new foods, tools, ideas, and unfortunately diseases. Then we were tasked to chose either a explorer from Spain, Portugal, France or England, or a pirate! Everyone instantly went for the pirates because when we think of pirates we think of adventures and stealing lots of money. So everyone wanted to do a pirate but only three groups were allowed to, and my group ( Holly and Kaden ) were lucky enough to get one of those spots. Now that we had our main topic, we had to start.
We started by creating a script. This script showed what order the story would go and what would happen during the story. We created this script by researching all about the life of Francis Drake, then taking the most important details and putting them into the story along with the most interesting ones. This way we had all the content for the story and now just needed to put it all into a comic using comic life . I had found the information and put it into a script with some help from the rest of my group to add detail here and there.
Before we could start creating first drafts, our teachers reminded us that this project wasn’t just about creating a comic about some pirate that we did some research on, it was about all pirates, pioneers, and the Age of Exploration. Plus modern day pirates, so to get a sense about modern day pirates we watched the Captain Phillips movie. This movie was really good because it showed how pirates in this day and age are much different from Golden Age pirates. They don’t have huge ships, huge crews, or even the classical weapons that pirates are usually associated with.They are small crews with small boats who don’t really steal the goods that are on the ship, instead they hold the crew for ransom and wait for companies to pay money. Here are some of things I wrote down while watching the movie.
Our first draft was messy and had just stick figures to represent were actual drawings would go. It was hard at first to get everything onto the comic without putting too much detail into it because that would come later, so we did our best to put just what we needed so then we could work on the real draft faster. This step was very important because it showed use where we needed more action or events and where we needed to shorten our story because it may have been to long.
Now that the very basic draft was done we could start adding more and more detail to make the comic look like a comic. This part was very fun because I really like to draw, so I drew most of the characters, backgrounds, sets, and one of the ships. I used Sketches pro to do this work. In the end we did have a few things to edit here and there but otherwise our comic was done. The really helpful part of Comic Life was that it let us add in our own speech bubbles to show that the characters were talking. It also let us create our own panels, sound effects, and images into our comic. Even though at the beginning the work was evenly spread between the three groups members, in the end two of of us ended up doing most of it. I guess I am learning a lot about group work in PLP this year.
Then finally our comic was done! I was very proud of the result.
To celebrate our teachers took us all our to White Spot! We had a great time and we all got pirate packs ( even though we are all too old).
I think this was a very fun project because it had a lot of historical parts that made us learn lots about our pirate, but also made us represent that in our drawings.