#survive thrive

[grits-gal-raised-in-the-south]

Meghan's borrowed Mantras

"The Monarchy will not SURVIVE, let alone THRIVE. "-The Crown Season 2 John Grigg AKA "Lord Altrinchan"

I think Meghan probably pulled this mantra from NETFLIX. In August 1957, journalist and editor John Grigg – or Lord Altrincham – wrote a scathing article in his publication the National and English Review. He criticised the Queen after her speech at the Jaguar factory.

Many prominent speakers have used the survive-thrive mantra. Since Meghan's ITV "faux Panorama interview," social media watchers have given most of the credit to Maya Angelou. In the 1990s, the cancer community popularized the idea of moving from surviving to thriving.

"The article caused a stir and a scandal, but not everyone disagreed – and that increased the pressure on the Queen to invite the BBC into her home for Christmas. So she did."

David Jones for the Daily Mail wrote: "Among the innumerable fascinating traits I uncovered when researching Meghan Markle's life story was her fondness for homespun mottos. She seemed to have an aphorism to suit almost every eventuality. One was recited to her friends whenever she embarked on some landmark venture, such as a career move or a new relationship. 'Never give it five minutes if you're not prepared to give it five years,' she would declare (omitting to say this mantra was originally coined by her first husband, Trevor Engelson). In an expletive-ridden interview, still to be found on the internet, he described how – using the word that later became Meghan's mantra – he 'hustled' his way to the top, and was determined to emulate his big-shot bosses."

Someone on Tumblr requested an updated list of Meghan's BORROWED Mantras. I'm not sure where I saw the request. I'm coping each of you w/hopes that someone will add this to the growing list. (Please also post on Twitter as I have been suspended.)

@honeytothebee @duchessofostergotlands @sandiedog @sassyfrassboss @yankeewally @honeytothebee @the-empress-7 @omgreadyteddy @the-best-soap-opera-ever @the-cat-with-the-emerald-tiara @thelondonroyal @youhavebeenmarkled @monstermarkle @washingtonandwinter @thefraudess @razziegirl @pagerice20 @duchessdreadful @meghantheduchyofpitstains @1234brewster @truthseekerblogger @mybuntyworld @briefcasegirl24

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7874687/Friends-Meghan-Markle-open-DAVID-JONES-Megxit.html

https://youtu.be/KXtjWb2vcbs

Posted 09-27-2020

[i-speakcoffee]

20 february 2018 is it bad that its only 4 weeks into the semester and i wish it was over already? need to get through 2 weeks of midterms and then spring break!

[jaslindon-blog]

Audio Inspiration

Run or Hide

Until Dawn, 2015

With this soundtrack, tension is being built up here; and there is creepy music to accompany this, I thought about using creepy music in my work for when the Hallucinations start to get worse and I thought this would go very well, and I want to use creepy music and the tension building in my audio, too. 

Eddie Gluskin’s Chase

Outlast: Whistleblower DLC, 2014

Tension is built up here; by building up layers of different sounds and sounds repeat more frequently to represent things getting closer and closer to you in the game.  I will use this as inspiration for my graphic novel, as I could use the idea of putting multiple layers of sound together to build up more tension as the Hallucinations get progressively harder to control for the characters. 

Alessa's Harmony

Silent Hill, 2006 

I could use this as inspiration for the music when the characters die, and when you get the screen of “you died.” The music is quite sinister and chilling but also gives you a little bit of emotion as it has a slow piano and this often pulls at heartstrings, but could also be used as mockery because you couldn’t make your character survive. 

[jaslindon-blog]

Characters Concept Art

Comparing first drawing to final design.

Alohi

Allura

Wyatt 

Sakari 

Art Style + Why I chose this?: 

I chose to use a chibi like art style because it is my favourite art style, and is easier to draw. But because I used FaceQ (miantanteam, 2017) as a heavy influence, you could say the art style is also “FaceQ.” I also chose simplistic designs for their clothes because it would be easy to duplicate for each page of the novel, and not every duplicate is always the same, and that would play with the perfectionist side of me, so I chose to have simplistic designs to calm this down. 

Colours (Connotations): 

Alohi: Her shirt is plain white because white connotes innocence, and perfection, which ties in smoothly with Alohi as she is a perfectionist. In the novel, she is also quite cautious of her surroundings, which also is another connotation of white. White is often associated with angels, and “white knights” and this is what Alohi does a lot (saving people) in the novel, as she often will have decisions to go and check on the others because of the white knight instinct. 

Allura: She is the flirtatious one of the group, and is the total opposite of her twin sister. She has a high sex appeal (hence her low cut shirt.) Even though red is the colour that connotes sexual interest and lust, and she strongly has this. I have chosen to go with a baby pink instead as Wyatt strongly uses red, and I didn’t want two characters to use the same colour, and since pink is seen as a very feminine colour, I chose this instead as she is the girly character. 

Wyatt: He wears the typical high school varsity jacket, like those shown in Glee (Glee, 2009 - 2015) , and this is to portray that he is from a high school, and loves sports, like his character profile states. As in horror films, the “jock” tends to be killed quite early on in films, and I’m using this to my advantage as I do not reveal whether he can easily get killed off. His jacket is red because red connotes the strong will to survive, and in the novel, he is the one that strives to survive more than the others (possibly because he is in the most difficult situation than the others!) but also because he is the most sporty and strives to be the fittest (survival of the fittest.) Red is also a strong colour that oozes sexual interest, and lust, which he does as he strongly has these feelings towards Allura.

(Glee, 2009 - 2015)

Sakari: He is seen as the “nerd” of the group, but doesn’t have the typical glasses stereotype. But he wears mainly blue because blue connotes a higher level of intelligence than others. It also connotes trust, and security which will play a part in the novel as Sakari is the one who leads the way, and makes most of the decisions. The others put their full trust in him when they cannot trust themselves. Similar to white, blue also connotes being the “helper” or “rescuer” per-say, and this is key because if Alohi is unable to help, Sakari is the back up. 

Why have they got no face?

In the character selection screen, I have purposely not given them faces, this is because I want you (the audience) to choose them based on their art style, and how they’re portrayed. I feel like, if they had facial features, it would ruin the “vibe” that I am trying to give off. 

[jaslindon-blog]

Researching into an existing Interactive Graphic Novel

Decisions that Matter 

Decisions that Matter is a Interactive Graphic Novel made by students at Carnegie Mellon University who go by the name of “Team Patronus.” Other than being an Interactive Novel, it also teaches people how to prevent sexual assault at college campuses and in general. 

The first thing it asks you for is your name because further on in the novel, you are addressed by name, and I found this a really good feature to include because instead of you having a set name and putting yourself in somebody elses shoes, you’re playing as yourself and being addressed as yourself. 

You get to choose what you type, which I find is a really cool feature of the graphic novel, as you really do get to play as yourself! 

I like this idea of what you choose matters half way down the story line, so urges the reader to choose wisely. This also seems like it uses the butterfly effect, and this is the mechanic I would love to include in my novel, but I just don’t have the time nor the creative writing skills to be able to do so. But as inspiration, I will definitely use the choosing what to write on your phone feature as it is really effective. Along with this, I like the idea of coding it to use your name, instead of a given characters name, and even though my characters you play as, have set names, I would like to be able to do this in a future project, maybe. 

[jaslindon-blog]

Making of the Graphic Novel

Production Diary 7

Software Used: Adobe Animate CC (Flash)

My Interactive Graphic Novel took many steps to get to where it is now. I was completely new to flash, as I hadn’t been present for any of the other lessons prior to making the novel on flash. So I had to sit down and learn how to use flash, from the teacher’s help, but also from figuring it out myself.

At first, I created three layers; Content, text and Actions, these are pretty self explantory but I’ll explain it for the production diary’s sake.

Text Layer: This is where all the text from all the frames will sit on, including the character profiles, and the text for each option you choose from. 

Content Layer: This is where all the content from all the frames will go on, excluding the text, things such as the pictures, title of the novel, and title of all the characters. 

Action Layer: This is where all the actions for each button will be on. 

For each page of the graphic novel, there is one frame, each frame itself is a keyframe. All these frames are created on the content layer. The black dot indicates a keyframe. 

At the start, I added plain text into each page telling me which page was what, whilst I still prepared the final artwork to go into the novel. 

Frame 1: Title

Frame 2: Backstory 

Frame 3: Character Selection 

Frame 4: Alohi character profile 

Frame 5: Allura character profile

Frame 6: Wyatt character profile

Frame 7: Sakari character profile

Frame 8: GAMEPLAY START 

Instead of adding another layer for the buttons, I just added them to my content layer - which was silly of me to do because looking back on it, I should have made another layer to save hassle. 

I added buttons to each of these pages, and tested whether they went back and forth between the pages I needed them to go to. Before I go anywhere else, to make a button, you have to right click on image you would like to be a button, and click “convert to symbol” and go down the drop down list to button. 

Code: 

There is only one button on the title page and that is the start button. If you right click on the button (once it has been converted into one) it should have the option of actions. If you click on it, it pulls up a pop up menu as shown in the next lot of screeshots. The two brackets (<>) means “code snippets” and i needed to click on this to bring up another list of options to click on, and I clicked timeline navigation. After this, I clicked on “Click to go to frame and Stop.” The only bit of code i needed to change after this, was the number in the bracket. And because the next page was the backstory and was on frame 2, so the number in the bracket is the frame number you would like it to jump to, when you click on that certain button. 

Adding Art work: 

Adding the art work was the easiest part of making this graphic novel, because all i had to do was import the photos from photoshop, scale them down into the right size for each of the profiles on the character selection screen. And this was done because the text were the buttons, not the images. 

Sound: 

If you double click on a button you would like to add sound to, it comes up with this (as shown in the picture.) 

Because I wanted the sound to occur when you click on the button, I added a keyframe in the “down” column. Before this, I imported the sounds I wanted for my novel into the library. 

On the right hand corner of the screen should be “button properties” and another sub heading saying “sound” I clicked on this, and selected the sound I would like to sound every time I clicked that button. 

I have to do this for every button, I would like to have sound. Some of the have different sounds, so with every button that has a different sound, all I did was have to repeat the process I stated above, but add the other sounds. 

I have three layers that have sound, because it isn’t wise to overlap sound on the same layers, so adding different layers makes it easier to add sounds that you have added. Sound 1 has the main ambience sound that goes throughout the whole of the novel. Sound 2 has the whispering that is heard from frame 3. And Sound 3 has the knocking sound when you are dared to enter the mansion on frame 8. 

2 hours before the final deadline, two of my frames decided to delete itself, putting me in a very unhappy mood as I was just about to export the novel,and it went back on itself. I managed to still submit on time, and fix the problem very quickly. Both Alohi and Allura’s paged had somehow been wiped of all the content and luckily because the two guy characters pages were set out the same, all i did was have to copy and paste their content into the girls, and just change the names to theirs, and the profile information to theirs, and also changing their photos. The buttons also had stopped working, so I had to go and recode these, which took some time as the actions panel kept closing itself, and disappearing. But in the end, I managed to code everything and make all the buttons work on time. 

What have I learnt from doing so?

From doing this, I have learnt how to use Flash to a basic level, how to code from frame to frame. This will be helpful if I ever want to continue or make a new Interactive Graphic Novel in the future. Before joining this course, I had no prior skills in any of the adobe products except fireworks. 

What will I do next?

After doing this, I have completed the practical side of my project, and wil go onto doing my self reflection (Evaluation.) 

[jaslindon-blog]

Button Checklist

Because I kept getting confused, and forgetting which buttons I had coded, and which buttons I hadn’t coded. Somebody in my class suggested to me that making a checklist of all the content I intended to do would be a good idea, and every time I had completed a task, to then tick them off. So this is what I did. 

This helped a lot because I could then see clearly which buttons I had done, and which buttons I hadn’t done. This made me get the work done super quick and efficiently. Thank you Lloyd! This also shows what I had originally planned to do, so anything that is added other than this, is more than I planned to do.  

[jaslindon-blog]

Gracebourne Manor Map

Even though, my project was a novel, I still thought it was ideal for me to draw out floor maps of the mansion as I could the physically picture the mansion layout, and help me place where the deaths are in the house.

I have highlighted in different colours the different rooms in which the deaths occur. Doing a map of the house also made me plan out routes for the characters to take. As you can see from the map, the library isn’t accessible unless you go through the ballroom, so the choice to go to the library cannot be the first choice when they walk into the mansion because you would have to go to the ballroom first. It would be accessible by Grand Foyer - Ballroom - Library. 

I also did another plan of all the doors, and rough deaths in the house. The doors are circled, pointing out all the doors helped me when deciding the walkthroughs of the house because it showed me what rooms could be accessed and what couldn’t be without entering another room. It also shows those who are looking at my work, that I took this into account this type of planning.