A Creepy Story for Stlaking pt.1

My next assignment for my Seqa class is a creepy stalker horror story.   So of course I brainstormed first.

It is a toss up between a space, Lovecraftian horror stalking a ship, and a monster stalking a guy and a prostitute only for the prostitute to eat the male before he does.

The difficulty in the space idea is showing the horror stalking the ship with very little objects to hide behind.  So I am going to catch my professor after class with some quick thumbnails to try and figure it out and get his opinion on it.

        Here are the thumbnails for the Space horror idea.  Now I just need to wait for his class to be finished for me to talk to hum about it.

My Very Own Odd Couple pt.2

So in the end, this is how my pages turned out.

   

I don't have time to go int too much about the process but these were a huge mess to deal with as alway.  Also never let the fact that you are working digitally let yo think you can messily place your spot blacks.  You still have to go in and clean that shit up.

                     The top image is inked traditionally.  It did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.  Also, at 3 a.m. I went back to my room to print out the blue line for the second page and my printer ran out of ink.  This was a poor decision process wise.  I had planned on messing with the figure in the second page before inking and ran out of time.  So in the end I had to ink the second  page digitally.  While these provides an interesting comparison, it doesn't really do well when submitting the assignment.

My Very Own Odd Couple pt.1

So for a class assignment, we had to create our very own odd couple and a two page comic that shows what their life is like.  I chose a straight bishounen character and a manly, gay man.   Here are the pencilled pages.

I had to really rush these pages.  They were mostly done over the course of  24 hours, and it really shows.  The story is that the gay man's mother is visiting, and the bishounen character is constantly hitting on her.  The mother eventually leaves and the bishounen character's younger brother is suddenly entranced by the gay man.


   

These are the error corrections I want to make.  However these also need to be fully inked by Teusday, and I have to work Saturday.

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.6

So the pages got finished and this is how they turned out.

The critique:

           - I am not very happy with how these turned out in the end.  Storytelling wise it's fine.  But there are many things that could have been better.

           -  The silhouettes get lost and were confused some of my class mates.  

           -  I completely forgot to change the panel borders for the flashback sequence. which really confused some people.  Also it was completely unnecessary to do a flashback sequence to begin with.  It would have been simpler to just do the meatball crash first.  I was making things too complicated and you always keep things simple to tell a good story.

            - I used a digital pencil brush to pencil it to save time, and I do not like how it looks at all.  

            - I was too focused in having the cool looking brain panel and lost the silhouette of the alien in it.  Which is pretty much focusing more on a coll looking panel versus storytelling.  that is something that I have gotten frustrated with a number of people for.  Rookie mistake basically.

            -  Also as it was brought up in class, I have no textures in this.  So I definitely need to work on that..

            - The biggest issue was time management.  I spent so much time on the preliminary stages that I got behind and had to rush the pages.  I could have easily saved time by just sketching out the alien silhouettes,  or not obsessing so much on that one part of it. 

             

            

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.5

       To get started, I need to create the panel layout for my pages.  To do this, I like to use Illustrator.  I have always found Illustrator much easier for working and manipulating things like text and border, as well as quickly changing the size of whatever I am working on.  I am going with the second run of thumbnails.

 The first thing I do is import the image into Illustrator.  I made sure the art board was the same size as the image, and locked it.

From there I used the rectangle tool to create the panels that I needed.  There are in red so that I can see them easier among the scribbles, but it is easy enough to change to black.

I wanted standard, even, 1/4" gutters throughout the page. To help me with this, I created a 1/4 in by 1/4 in box.

This is a trick that I picked up while making my resume in InDesign.  It makes it really for managing even spaces without having to use a ruler.  Like so.

Simple, easy, and no math required.  Then I just save it as an Illustrator file, and copy and paste it to the page in Photoshop as a vector smart object.  

Now on to the drawing.

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.4

  Creating the character model is another example of why I like working digitally so much.  To begin with I was able to make this  with the silhouette.

Followed by taking this line art form the Photoshop work file

and pasting it to the new file to work from.

         If I was doing this traditionally, I would have had to redraw the figure or use a light board.  both of which are quite frustrating and time consuming.

          This is how the character model turned out.

I want to be able to go back and add more detail to it, but I really need to get stared on the pages.

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.3

  While waiting to hear back from some people, I took a look at the structure of my story and wrote some things down along with my notes.

       I had yet to even thumbnail my pages yet, so I decided to proceed with that next while letting the ending  options process through my brain.  I decided to take the time and do 2 run throughs of thumbnails.
Runthrough 1:

 Runthrough 2:

       So now I need to choose which thumbnails to work with.  I like my panel layout in the 2 set, along with how much happens in the story.  However the simplicity of the 1st run through is nice as well, and you can very easily put in too much information.  Also I still need to make a character model for the alien and a concept for the ship so it doesn't look like a spaceman spiff ripoff.  Of course I really need to have these pages as finished as possible by tomorrow morning.

               So I had finished the first page of my second run through and I realized something.  

This actually turned into a happy accident.  By the time I realized this I was already thinking of what other things I could have happen before they reach the rocket ship.  So instead of cutting those things out I did this instead.  

I like how this shows a lot of things happening while not taking up too much time story wise.  It is actually one of the nice things you can achieve easily with comics.  I definitely plan on using it in the finals.

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.2

        To create the alien parasite I looked up references of scary insects, and parasites.  But mostly of scary looking insects.  Silhouettes are very, VERY important in readability of not only a composition, but of a character as well.  Therefore, I decided to make silhouettes of my character ides first before doing a completed character model of the final idea. I also combined my reference images into a single image using Photoshop to make it easier to look back at them.

          I decided to come up with three different concepts for the alien.  Which I then began getting opinions on which is scarier.  The one that I would like to use is the top one because it is cartoonier and in my opinion ,would be easier to work with.  However I plan to go with whatever is the most popular.

  Also, My reference jpeg got bigger as well because I was constantly adding to it as I was thinking of new ideas.

The Class Assignment that is Two Pages Pt.1

     So I am back in classes doing my last chance attempt to finish my degree.  Either I get 2 A's or my GPA won't be high enough to graduate.  Also my curriculum resets at the end of the quarter.  This means that I will have to start all over again. So the Gangam Style project is on hold at the moment.  But enough about that.


       My current assignment for my Intro to Seqa class is a 2 page comic involving an island and being stranded.  I was in a toss up between to ideas.  One is to incorporate the assignment into a story about a man going to a party with his boyfriend and suddenly finds himself left alone with no men in sight.  My other idea is a parasite that crash landed and digs through a person brain to control the body to escape.  I sent an email to the teacher about the two ideas, and I have yet to hear back so I am going with the parasite Idea which will probably be easier.

          So to start off with I  looked up some reference.

       Mostly insects and brain parasites.  Also I looked and some old Calvin and Hobbes space man comics, since I decided that I want to try and add a little bit of tribute to it so to speak.  It is probably the real reason I am doing this idea honestly.  Next up I need to do my list for story, reference needed, etc., etc.

      I gathered a bunch more reference and  put X's next to the reference that I have gathered so far.  I stopped at this point so that I could work on figuring out what my main character would look like.

The Storyboard Animatic Project of Learning pt.21

 While I was in the process of getting a lot of After Effects work done on the animatic, I realized that a lot of my timing was suddenly off.  Of course I got really stressed, and tried to figure out what happened.  Apparently my slider bar, for my reference video was like this.

It should have looked like this.

Now I had planned on writing about how I went fixing this and the frustration involved.  Along with realizations that could have saved me time, followed by how I was wrong.  Basically it was a whole mess. 

I mean look at all these images.

 Here's the lesson.

ALWAYS LOCK YOUR TIMING BAR!!!!

The I Don't Have Time For This Pr Bono Project pt.5

      While I was drawing the final images, I told by the producer that they were using a 16:9 aspect ratio instead of a 4:3 aspect ratio.  I didn't have to change it, but I decided to try and figure out something.  I decided to finish them as 4:3, and then crop them to 16:9.  Honestly, this is not the best of choices.  The two aspect ratios are completely different and even the rule of thirds will not work very well with the transition. I simply did not have the time to redo them.  Here is how I cropped them though.

I found this image on Google an used Illustrator to create an empty box.

I then pasted the box in the final image.

Create a selection for the aspect ration, and then inverse it.  

 Erase everything around the new aspect ratio and the lines of the old aspect ratio.

Increase the size of the new panels to fit, and your done.

       I then made a PDF of both aspect ratios just in case, and sent them to the editor.  Of course it was 6 am, and I had pulled an all-nighter the previous night, but it was well worth it in my opinion.

The I Don't Have Time For This Pr Bono Project pt.4

       The final images where very quick and not exactly pretty.

        However they are still readable which is the biggest point when storyboarding.  While working on the final boards I remembered how awesome drawing storyboards digitally can be.

      These two boards are the same perspective, shot etc.  The only thing that changes is that the car moves forward a little and that the head turns.  If I was doing this traditionally, I would either have to light board, redraw form scratch, or a number of time consuming options.  Here is what I did instead.

             I copied the under drawing from the first board.

Pasted it down for the other board.

Drew over the under drawing

And did the final drawing over it.

        Honestly, if I could have digital drawings babies, I would.  Do this traditionally and you would understand how much better this is.  Especially on a time limit like mine.   This wasn't the only time I did something like this during the project, and it can definitely become a beautiful magical time saver. 

I really love digital drawing.

             

The I Don't Have Time For This Pr Bono Project pt.3

      Normally I really prefer to do 2 full runs of thumbnails while going in two completely different directions.   I find this really helpful in coming up with better shots and camera pans.  I did not have time for this however so I had to go with my first run.
                       Next I made my storyboard formats for 4:3.  The producer wasn't sure what they were going to use at the time so I went with what he was hoping for.  After making my board pages for the correct format, I went ahead and did some blue line thumbnails from my first run.

 and then saved them as Photoshop files so that I could just open the file and work back into them for the final drawings.  I also saved a JPEG version so that I can make a PDF for the producer.

      I decided to try something new with using the horizon lines on this project.  I found a post on Tumblr about how you can use the horizon line to show which characters point of view the viewer is seeing.   Since the story is about a father and son who lost someone, I used the horizon line to show when it is the father's viewpoint and the son's viewpoint.  

     After I finished with the blue line thumbnails, I combined them into a PDF and sent them to the producer.  The reason I was sending these so much was because of the time limit and the fact that I was working two jobs.  I really had no idea if I would get them to the final stage in time or not.

         The producer happened to be in the lab where I was working so I went over the storyboards with him, and apparently there was a small problem with the steadicam shot that I had planned.  

The problem was that they were not sure if they could get a steadicam operator in time.  So I went back and planned out the sequence using still shots instead.  

I sent the alternate sequence to the producer and started to work on the final drawings.