In early 2025, I decided to make a fresh attempt at writing the Critical Review.
I had completely forgotten and lost enthusiasm for any of the potential ideas I considered in 2023, so I started thinking about new possibilities. The topic that I kept returning to was that of dialogue-free sequential narratives and characters within these in both animations and illustration examples.
I also took into consideration the research material I had access to in terms of books as I tend to find it a bit overwhelming looking aimlessly on the internet, bookmarking countless pages (none of which I never actually refer to) and getting absolutely nowhere.
Some of the notes I made regarding the initial ideas can be seen below.
The enduring problem I had with the Critical Review, since 2023, was being able to narrow down the idea into the form of a question for the Critical Review’s title, as suggested in the course notes. This was a real sticking point and I got so frustrated trying to come up with a worthwhile solution.
As I now knew I needed to stop procrastinating, I took the positive step of compiling a selection of books that I hoped would assist with my research. I read through each of these from cover to cover. I also did find a selection of valid resources online. As I was doing so I made notes of any text that I thought potentially related to my discussion. I ended up with realms of paper! I then typed up all of these notes (along with the page number/book title/etc). This laborious process took an extremely long time, but I find I work best in this way and the information became embedded in my head.
Indeed, bolstered by such a volume of valuable material, I now felt ready to begin working on my Critical Review under the temporary title: Character Design in Dialogue-Free Sequential, Visual Narratives. I worked methodically and tried to reference the research as much as possible, but ensuring I used my own words. I created several drafts and it took me about a month to reach the final version, for which I came up with the title: How does the absence of words/dialogue in sequential visual narratives affect the potential for communicating with an audience?
I ended up thoroughly enjoying the whole process. I found the research part to be incredibly worthwhile and absorbing. Once I got over the hurdle of finding topic that I found interesting and knew I had access to relevant books that referred to this, I felt much happier and enthusiastic.