Reposted with permission:
To those of us behind this comic book, it's sometimes just as fun to learn how to do this, as it is to be doing the comic book.
First of all, none of us want this to be complex. We all want it to be simple and fun from start to finish, and yet also put out a quality product worthy of our time.
The first comic book was a learning lesson for us all, with a steeper learning curve for some. From start to finish, principal "filming" (that is, taking screen shots), lasted about three hours. At first, each person responsible would take the snapshot, take a look at it in the folder on their computer, and then tell the others that it was good, and we would move on to the next. However, each of us started to get a feel for this, and were more confident in what was happening and how to get it right, so that sped things up. Then, we had Alexandria Icegem acting as 'prop master', shifting things around to help get the right shot -- that helped a lot.
So that everyone would understand what was happening, the writing team (Valkoor Legend, Jessica Windwalker, and Kane Dragonblood) had spent a week creating a storyboard, which had then been e-mailed out to everyone who would be partaking in this endeavor. Each shot that was needed for the story was already envisioned, with the members of the writing team having done a lot of location scouting, and tweaking of the story to match the locations we had available -- a lot of story adjustments were made on the spot during filming.
For the first comic book, we started off with four characters. One stood in to allow for quick teleportation from here to there, and the others were acting and shooting (Jessica, Valkoor, and Alexandria). Then we lost our "porter", and it was three actors/filming crew. Then halfway through, we were down to two, then the last third of the time was just Valkoor running around in ice tunnels and trying not to mess up his marker set in Alexandria's house in order to finish up shooting.
We called it a night, some earlier than others, and we were all pretty happy with ourselves. Until the next day when all of the "raw" footage was received by our film editors, Valkoor and Jessica.
First thing we noticed was that Alexandria, bless her heart, had been purposely stepping out of Valkoor's screen shots, and had been purposely grabbing screen shots of just herself, with no Valkoor in them. The shots with two or more characters interacting were a good deal more powerful than the shots of a singular character just doing stuff. And, the singular character shots were harder to make interesting. So, there were a number of shots, about a third of the story, where Valkoor and Alexandria don't seem to interact. Even with good editing, we could not bring the two together.
This called for a re-shoot. Unfortunately, this could not happen as Alexandria was going to be off the game for a week or two for the holidays. So, we had to run with the material we had.
Then, in our effort to keep things simple and enjoyable, we were using a very simple picture editing program -- the caveman predecessor of Photoshop. Which gave us practically no options on how to edit. So, as aggravating as the speech and thought bubbles are, we did the best we could.
After all, this was meant to be fun, not a pain in the rear.
The second comic book involved more characters wanting to get in on this. That greatly complicated things. Thankfully, Kane took a more active role in directing. His first action was to make 'not sticking to the storyboard' a capital offense -- either stick to it, or you're gone, he said. Next, Jessica took the role of "personnel coordinator". And, Valkoor took the role of "continuity editor". With more people involved, it became very hard to have them all in one place at one time, long enough to shoot any large part of the story.
So, Jessica via e-mail (everyone already knew each other out there in the real world, and already had each others' contact info; nothing was shared on the game) coordinated with everyone and got set up time and date for shooting certain sequences. Then, Valkoor ensured that the things we shot fit in with the other parts and pieces of the story with as little problems as possible. And, Kane was there making sure that the story made sense and was not damaged.
Also, our locations got more exotic (I am referring to the "Outlaws' Den" location, which was actually Amber Dragonblood's home, so she had to be on location so everyone could port in and out). And then we got further help from Taryn Silversword who worked costumes. To add another level to the story, people could not just wear whatever they felt like, nor wear their battle gear. Everyone had to be in costume, with many of those costumes designed by Taryn (she completely did Valerian Lifewielder's get-up as the librarian -- we wanted him to look sort of like a monk, but not like a monk).
The complexity for the second book went up several notches, but with more people doing the work, it remained fun.
Before we started doing anything, the first thing the writer team asked was, "How do we express emotion? How do we have any expression?"
We first assumed, wrongly, that Wizard101 characters expressed nothing. However, we dedicated weeks to examining our characters in all sorts of situations around the spiral, and we came to have a deep appreciation for the designers and art work guys at Kingsisle. The characters do have expression, just very much so subdued.
For instance, any female character, when left standing with no input from keyboard or mouse, will randomly put her left hand on her hip, then look right, then look left, before resuming standing pose. And likewise, all male characters will do something similar.
So how do we use this? Kane told us to put it into context. The best example I can think of right now is from one of our "blooper" shots. Jessica is standing next to Valkoor, they are both taking in the statues, and then Jessica puts her hand on her hip, turns slightly to Valkoor, then we add the dialogue of, "Do we really need all these statues?"
Suddenly her slight movement adds to the dialogue, and vice versa. And, instead of Valkoor just standing there like a statue himself, something is added to him by Jessica's actions.
We began to really pay attention and look for those little moments to grab a shot. Unfortunately, after trying to time the intervals between these 'character moments', we realized that they are kind of random. This made filming a game of patience. We would spend long minutes not doing a thing, our fingers poised over the "grab screen" key on our keyboard, waiting for the split second that our characters gave us what we wanted. If we missed it, back to waiting.
But those little adjustments really made some shots great, especially when Artur Lightbringer was in his wolf transformation. We actually got a lot more expression from him than our regular characters. In fact, we swear that there is one shot, captured by total accident, where the wolf's eyes are looking to the side instead of straight ahead. So it made it look like that the wolf character was looking at the person he was talking to while walking. It was brilliant, and we all had a long and happy discussion about it via e-mail.
Another instance with the wolf, was when the characters were standing still, and we were all waiting for something to happen, for them to express themselves. The wolf started twirling his dual-blade fighting thingie, and Artur was rapidly clicking the 'grab screen' key. He got like six or seven shots while the wolf was spinning his weapon. In one of the shots, it looks like the wolf is gesturing with his hand, while looking at Valkoor's character, and has his weapon just resting on his shoulder.
It was perhaps the most brilliant shot we captured for the whole second comic book. We were thrilled!
So you see, we got really nerdy while making this. But we had tons of fun, and that extra patient effort (we thought) added a new level of quality and richness to the comic book and the seemingly limited resources we had to do this with.
-- Jessica
No comments:
Post a Comment