Timeframing: The Art of Comics on ScreensMain MenuSpace Into Game, Time Into Book: What Comics and Screens Do TogetherQuick ClipsRecommended ReadingDigital Comics PortfolioErik Loyerf862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637Site by Erik Loyer
Timeframing in Contemporary Media
12020-07-25T05:45:04-07:00Erik Loyerf862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa6379852plain2020-07-25T05:45:26-07:00Erik Loyerf862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637Looking broadly at our digital media environment, it becomes clear that we spend much of our time within highly elaborate timeframed compositions: collections of temporally bounded units layered and juxtaposed. Even a VR experience, with its illusion of seamless presence, is often made up of many time-limited animations composed to encourage immersion, with their seams largely erased; by contrast, in a video editing program, those seams are explicit, arranged to facilitate the construction of singular linear video streams. In a digital comic, the seams are likewise visible, but for a different purpose: to serve the expressive aims enabled by multi-panel compositions and the other characteristics which make comics unique. And of course, of late we have become all too familiar with a very specific genre of timeframing: the Zoom call, with its semantic fusion of panel with person. These boxes, though they may be broadcasting live video, are also temporal vignettes; they are spatially and temporally bounded — they do not last forever, as we see here in this mass exodus of students from a USC master class with Jacob Collier.