I’m afraid it’s a short post today as I’m in the midst of celebrating my 18th birthday! Well, to be honest it was yesterday but with the family do tomorrow I’m extending it to a three day long weekend of festivities. Anyway, in true media student style this week’s reading from Scott McCloud was an extract from what I can only deduce was a textbook made entirely out of comic strips. An engaging concept, McCloud in this chapter talked about the idea of ‘closure’ in comics: the audience’s inferred understanding of the missing action from the existing frames. For example, in the two below frames from one of Alex Noriega’s comics on his blog Stuff No One Told Me, we don’t actually see the protagonist go from the airport to his hotel room, but we infer that he has from the action that we can see.

I thought this was particularly relevant to us in media this week because of our self-portraits. While the media elements of our portraits didn’t create a narrative, the audience did have to infer meaning and fill in the blanks of our personalities based on what we supplied in our self-portraits. So, I want to do a bit of a shout-out to the three other guys who I was working with on Thursday when we were giving feedback on the assignment. Each took a very different approach and it was a really interesting way to learn a bit more about my classmates.

Daniel used awesome cinematography to capture his tendency towards introspection, although his ‘joke time with Daniel’ is sure to give a laugh.

Gloria captured her love of fashion and nature and used her text really creatively to give a clear sense of her personality and her lifestyle.

Emma reflected upon her years of travelling and constructed a really clear sense of home in her piece.