THE SIMPSONS NEWS

So this epic storyboard I’m working on has turned out to be…well…epic.  It’s a little over 40 scenes (shots) long but there’s a lot going on in it. I was thinking I’d be done by Friday but I had three meetings with the director and the head director over it and there’s always something that can be done to improve it. I don’t mind, this is the process. How it all works. I especially don’t mind since the changes are all done on the first “rough scribble pass” which makes things easier for me as an artist to change or throw out.

The project has no dialogue and we didn’t know exactly how long it would be, so I also had to time my roughs in order to get an idea for it’s length.  It’s a fun project, I must admit. I only wish I didn’t feel so pressured to finish.  That said, I WANT to be done by Friday. Hopefully, somehow, I might be able to clean up the whole thing in two days.  Whether or not I will succeed is another story.

I might be going on hiatus later than I thought, because of this. Which isn’t horrible, but it will take away time from my commission work.

ART

Speaking of special projects, I’ve finally finished getting passed thumbnailing page 7 of my script. I just forced myself to sit down and really concentrate on getting through it. So far, I’ve thumbnailed out 327 scenes/shots. Far more than I anticipated:

I thought about it for hours before I got to the drawing it and by the time I sat down, I knew what I was going to do.  It went by much faster this way. It also helped that I watched a movie with a fight scene that game ideas.  I really should have been doing that much more before I sat down to draw the fights.  I just didn’t have time to do that since I worked on this stuff during lunch.  It would have taken all my time looking at fight in order to get inspired or get ideas. By the time I would be ready to draw, my lunchtime would have been over.

Perhaps, during hiatus or during the weekends I can be home and look at fight scenes I like to see if I can plug in some of what I see into the roughs I’ve already go.  It would be much easier to do something like that, now that I have something down, than it was when I was starting from scratch.

In any case, I think the worst is behind me now.  There’s still one more battle to thumbnail, but it’s not as physical as the ones I’ve just done.  It will hopefully be less of a handful.

COMIC BOOKS/BLOGS

Digital/Web comics are becoming more and more exciting to me.  I’ve been getting more and more into them lately.  For a long time I hadn’t been very interested in these comics because the quality of the art and storytelling hadn’t really been up to snuff. I really wanted a similar experience reading them as I did reading printed comics.   Well, it seems like that’s changed quite a  bit the last couple of years. Comics online and “digital only” comics, are just as good now, and sometimes, better than the printed stuff.  Part of the reason is that many professional comic creators have started doing Digital work.

The latest of the these is Mark Waid, who wrote KINGDOM COME and SUPERMAN: BIRTHRIGHT among many other things.  He decided he was going to start putting out Webcomics.  He’s also turned his blog into a “process blog”. Kinda similar to what I do here in my ART sections.

His Digital comics site will go up on May 1st and it’s called THRILLBENT. I’ll let you know what I think about it when it goes live.  But right now, I want to call attention to his blog Markwaid.com.  Mostly because I like how he’s approaching doing the comics.  Though his a professional comic writer, he’s quite frank about how little he knows about writing for digital comics.

Digital comics and comics on the web are a very different monsters than printed comics. What works in print doesn’t necessarily work in the digital medium.  So he’s writing about what he learns as he goes. He also writes about the approaches he takes and the experiments he makes.  I like to read this stuff because it puts us all in the same boat.  Also, he likes some of the approaches to digital comics that I also like.  This makes it seem to me, as I read his blog, that we’re on the same page.

Since I’m also going to put a web comic up, when I’m done with my current project, building on what Mark Waid discovers that works or doesn’t work seems like a good idea to me.  I’ve been reading his blog with great interest and I’m very curious to see how things pan out for him.

Check it out, if you’re interested in this digital medium.
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