I stayed up way too late for the Rogue One Trailer last night. It was worth it but I’m feeling it this morning. The good news is I should be wrapping up my script and thumbnails for the next 25 pages today. At one page a week thats 6 months of material… I hope I can get faster. 2 pages a week sounds a lot better. I am definitely trying to figure this whole thing preproduction thing out but its hard for me to grasp how you can write a script without thumbnails. There is no official structure when it comes to writing a script for a comic but figuring out pacing and how much or how little to put on a single page is the the biggest snag for me.
I wrote an outline and a quick script with some arbitrary page and panel structure only to toss 90% of it out when I went back to actually thumb nailing. Releasing a page at a time also imposes its own rules as each page starts to feel like a beat or a lead up to the next page. You can’t leave it with a half thought. That would be jarring and unfair to your web readers but I still feel slave to the final print product. I’m sure its a learned skill and as I start to figure out my style it will become more fluid. Though for now it feels more like molasses than water.
Certainly the one thing I’ve learned this time is just how connected my panel structure is to assisting characters convey their “acting.” While having the different emotional faces and gesture do a lot to communicate intent, I’m finding that nuanced dialogue and emotion is a fairly difficult thing to convey in sequential art. I’m definitely fighting it. The medium gives you the opportunity to crunch and expand time but it can also create unfortunate over magnification of certain moments when all you really want is subtlety. These next 25 pages have a lot of dialogue and allusion to back story that requires an emotional connection to the characters as things get set up. There isn’t enough action and peril to suck in the reader so their interactions have to be straight forward but complex. It may be an all ages comic but I still want it to resonate with my readers. They are investing the most precious of commodities – time.
Thats it for now. Back to the script and thumb nailing. Real work is going to take over next week so hopefully I can get a quick blog post in between projects but a new page will be up on Monday for sure (our first hint at what this mission is about). Thanks for following along!
