Having a crisis!

SO I am concerned that I don't have enough time to do everything I want to with my graphic novel and animation and I am going to have to decide very soon which direction I really want to go in.

The problem is that I didn't enjoy animation as much as I had hoped, and the idea of having to sit and draw the almost exact same image over and over again for another 6 months is quite upsetting. I am not sure now if it is something I want to do - both for the final show and in the long run.

I am also discovering that to be a concept artist and illustrator in the video game industry, I also need skills in other software that I just don't have time to learn for the time being. I think I will go back to these once the MA is over and once I have time and an income (they are incredibly expansive to buy and lease).

My goal for the MA has always been to get a job in a creative industry and to expand my skills set to allow me to do so. This goal hasn't changed, but I think the industry I want to go into is changing. I am starting to think that actually like to do book illustration or graphic novels as a full time job, rather than video games. Eventually I might look t doing both, once I have learned the other software I would need, but more immediately, the game job dream is going on hold.

This however isn't the crisis, the crisis is that if I am not

going to do animation, how am I going to make my graphic novel stand out, and be worthy of the MA?

This is not exciting or interesting, it is a very boring looking graphic novel, and to be honest, I wouldn't read an entire comic that looked like this. I need to find a way to make the cells and pages more immersive and interesting. I also cannot just make a single graphic novel, there needs to be more to it than that. I don't know what yet, just more.

In my tutorial Yadzia suggested making a graphic novel of two parts a physical book that read one way tells the back story of Fliss (the pink haired elf) and read the other way tells the backstory of my human prince, Tristan (the subject of my animation last module) and the two stories meet in the middle and merge into the main narrative together. I really love the idea of this, but the script I have written has taken MONTHS and I don't have time to write enough backstory to fill a decent graphic novel. I do have the backstories for the characters, but they are meant to be dotted in with the main narrative rather than seen all in one go.

It is also a problem, they they will be really boring, or too much unpleasantness in one go. My prince' backstory would be boring if laid out chronologically over a large number of pages, and my elf's story is too grim and unpleasant and I think it might put people off reading it. This is why I decided to throw the reader and the characters straight into this action of Fliss fleeing her people and running into Tristan in the woods. It is a more exciting starting narrative, and it has an air of mystery. Why is she running? Why is she being chased by people who look like they are the same race as she is? What is he doing alone in the woods? Why do the elves fight him? These are things that will come out in the story over time, it's like unpacking a mystery (if I do it well, but judging by the way I am writing this post, that may also be problematic!)