Pat's rough thesis work

To fill in the blanks:

I am exploring manga, anime and cartoons and their roles in Japanese and American culture because I am trying to find out how/why those mediums are more commonly accepted in Japan vs. American cultures, and what specifically goes into the creations of each in order to help my reader understand how each came to be what it is, why it is accepted for what it is, and what its future looks to be.

I am producing a project aimed for the layman/casual/uninformed reader.


And to put it another way, in a more casual style:

Originally I was hoping to do something cinematic, with heavy use of the arts, possibly as a video game. But that was before I had decided on a topic, or rough topic, to work with. Now that I have a better understanding of what it is I'd like to work on/study, I have a better idea of what I would like my project to be.

Thanks to a lack of an extensive background in the arts, it would be nearly impossible for me to create an anime to cover a topic like this. However, I believe with enough work and the right tools, an interactive manga or comic might prove more capable and applicable. What elements I would use to make it interactive would be rather tricky, though. If I were to create a comic, I could easily fall into the rut of a narrative structure, and as appealing as that is, it might not necessarily work for what I'm trying to achieve. Then again, if it were to be a narrated pseudo-documentary, then I believe an interactive comic/manga would fit perfectly for my topic.

One of the nice things about the medium would be that I could easily contrast the different styles of each (anime, manga, comic), as well as break down each to determine what it is exactly that each consists of and makes it what it is (is it the artwork? the text? the voices?). I know one of the things I would definitely be interested in would be, and this would show why the project would need to be multimedia, to take a scene and dissect according to each medium, starting from only having text, to adding basic artwork, then possibly voices, and finally a completely animated scene. But my problem with this would be the time it would take to create something of this magnitude what with 1. my limited artistic skills (granted they aren't entirely unqualified, more so unexperienced, but it doesn't take long for me to get into a groove, so I'm not really too concerned so long as my other problem can be surpassed, which is...), 2. a lack of proper tools to create this type of project. But then again, I already know that I would like to make this project through a computer, and so I already have an idea of what tools I could/would need/use: Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator, among others.

And that is currently where I'm at. I am still without an instructor, but I have one in mind, granted he is under a different school (Akira Mizuta Lippit of the School of Cinematic Arts -however, I believe I'm taking a class with his wife, Miya Mizuta Lippit, so I don't think it would be too much of a problem to work with him).