Sequential Art: Nature’s Revenge

Sequential Art: Nature’s Revenge September 30, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — tmwalsh2 @ 5:21 pm

For my sequential art project, I continued on with the theme of nature, focusing this time on the cycle of nature’s growth, destruction by man, and subsequent regrowth. I entitled it “Nature’s Revenge.” I first got the idea by thinking of a plant’s growth process as sequential and able to be documented in photographic sequence, and then I added the idea of man’s destruction of nature and nature’s triumph over man to give it a message (i.e. nature always finds a way to prevail).

At first I started out with the simple idea of having pictures of a plant growing, a tree, a person cutting down a tree, an urban setting, a plant growing in the crack of a sidewalk, ivy on a house, and then the Asian vine, kudzu, which grows to cover everything. When I started looking for pictures online (I didn’t have any personal pictures of any of these except the kudzu and didn’t think I’d be able to find all of them locally so I decided to get them all online via Google Image), I gradually kept expanding on my idea until I winded up with 28 pictures total for my sequential photo essay! I thought my initial idea might be too separated and disjointed so I included more photos to illustrate the entire long growth process from a plant budding to a tree-filled forest covering vast hillsides, the snowballing destruction process in which one house in the forest leads to cutting down some trees which leads to multiple houses and multiple tree demolition to highways and cities taking over and the forest completely obsolete, and finally the prevailing rebuilding process that stems from a single bud in the cracks of a sidewalk to the total take-over of whole houses and all surroundings.

In regards to presentation, I had a few issues because of how many photos I ended up including in my photo essay… initially I had planned to group the photos into a horizontal panoramic collage. However I couldn’t fit them all into one, so then I decided to separate them into three horizontal panoramic collages: one displaying the plant’s growth spanning from a picture of the plant’s initial growth to a picture of the tree-covered hills, one displaying man’s destruction of nature spanning from a single house in the woods to a cityscape with no plant life visible, and one displaying nature’s regrowth and ‘revenge’ spanning from a single plant growing in a sidewalk crack to kudzu spreading over everything in sight. These also proved to be not the best option as the entire collage wouldn’t fit on my webpage so the viewer would have to click on the image to see all the photos, taking them to a different webpage and making the images quite small and hard to see. This made the flow still seem disjointed since there were three separate collages of pictures and each one had to be viewed separately, thus not connecting the entire message (more like seeing the separate stages to the process). So then I made the collages vertical (so they could span down the page and be seen all at once). Of course they are still too long and the viewer must scroll down the page to see all the pictures, but there’s not much else I can think to do, unless I group them into smaller horizontal collages (like 3 pics each) or if I printed all the pictures out and put them on a piece of paper and then took a picture of that! This process really made me realize how presentation can affect the message – grouping certain items/images together influences the way the viewer perceives/interprets the images, connecting some and disconnecting others. It also made me realize the limitations of mediums (i.e. a computer screen) – if I had these images printed out and able to physically put them wherever/however I wanted to, I might be able to express what I had in mind more easily; instead it is displayed on a website on a computer screen, which has its visual limitations (either the pictures are too small – thumbnail size, or too big to fit on the screen so the viewer needs to scroll, not seeing the whole thing at once). So, although the presentation isn’t ideal, I hope the message still gets across!

image sources:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Small_cannabis_plant_growing.jpg2) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1586484/posts

http://www.bijlmakers.com/fruits/avocado.htm

http://treesifyouplease.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

http://www.duke.edu/~cwcook/trees/saal.html

http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/12/19/green-gift-guide-gifts-that-give-back/

http://warnell.forestry.uga.edu/warnell/kahrs/i/MaritimeForest3.jpg

http://www.natures-desktop.com/natures-desktop-nottinghamshire4.php

http://flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/359943069/

http://cycling.stanford.edu/

http://www.blackrockforest.org/docs/teacher-student-resources/HousingResources/ForestLodge.html

http://picasaweb.google.com/anika.green/Cruising2007#5156971897486547586