In my health informatics class, I was introduced to the concept of using the photonovella as a mechanism for health education. I learned that this form of communication is very strong in South America, Africa and many underdeveloped countries.
This surprised and delighted me. The idea that a comic book-like format could do so much social good was enlightening.
Sherry, my partner on this project, and I decided we would focus on childhood health/fitness/obesity. Sherry scoped out several programs for creating photonovellas and she suggested we use "Comic Life". I agreed that it had a very accessible format.
I started to consider what our story might consist of and began to run memories of childhood literary favorites through my head: Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Stuart Little, The Borrowers, etc.
I was enamored with the idea of including little people or characters. My daughter had a copy of "Indian in the Cupboard" on her bookshelf so I breezed through that and loved it. However, I realized that including small figures in our pictures would add a level of technicality that might be quite difficult and time consuming.
After I saw "Alice in Wonderland" in 3-D with my family, I thought it might be a good idea if our main character went to sleep and woke up in a different, healthier, world.
From that point, everything began to fall into place. Comic Life has 16 panels to choose from and the first decision I made was to use each panel at least once. I asked my husband to give me his initial impression of what each panel indicated visually. From there, my story started to take form as a young person transitions from unhealthy to healthy thoughts and habits.
Sherry has recruited family members to participate in the actual photo sessions and we are going to use computer-aided treatment of the "other" world photos to help distinguish them from the photos taken of things happening in this world.
This is a very cool project and I am really happy to be working on it.
More soon!
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This has been very fun. My nieces and their friends have been having fun helping me. I even got one of my sisters and her fiance to help.
ReplyDeleteFunny, people use this concept to educate citizens that reside in low socio-economic countries; I just heard of Photo- Novella in class two weeks ago. As nurses, we are supposed to educate all types of patients and I don’t know about common tools to teach with. I guess you really stop growing as a professional if you don’t keep up with advances in technology. I need to remain a student forever!
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