Tonight’s installment… “Details, Details, Details”
The Process
We had our creative team on board and now it was time to get things moving. I am somewhat of a type A personality. I like activity and some form of chaos, probably why my wife and I have three kids under the age of five. Chaos rules at our house. However, I also like it at work. For this project activity was going to be constant because our team was committing to the project. Everyone had their roles. Tim would do the interior “current day” sequentials and color all pages. John would lend his name and do the “flashback” pencils. I was in charge of everything else.
First, I fine tuned the story. Before I wanted the guys to work on it I had to make sure the script was tight. I also wanted to make sure a friend of mine got a chance to review it and give me his thoughts. Dan Murphy and I have been friends for years. He is a writer for Pro Wrestling Illustrated (who just broke the story of Yokazuna’s victory over Hulk Hogan) as well as several books on the Western New York area. He worked with me on many of the BallparkBrawl wrestling events we had at the stadium and I respected his writing and work ethic. He looked the piece over and critiqued it for me.
Always good to have others review your work. Now, you have to take their commentary in some ways with a grain of salt. If they are friends of yours, chances are they will like the piece. Even if it about little aliens and their formulation of the New World Order. They are your fiends and they want to help…so they will almost always be overly positive. To get through that and get some real substance from the commentary I like to ask for help with a somewhat benign topic like grammar. People have an acceptance of friends correcting their grammar. They may not love it but they accept the need to speak with the proper grammatical prose. Once they start to make changes with a few comas and accents a transformation usually takes place. Now, all of a sudden, your friend who would never criticize your creative outlet in a million years now feels comfortable enough to disagree with your characters motivation on page four! Now you are getting some where. Now you get input that will help to improve the piece. Of course, friends sometimes get carried away but that is a separate conversation.
Once Dan fixed the commas and questioned the extensive exposition on page 2, I had a pretty tight script that moved along nicely and had a decent mix of back-story with current day action. I also spent a lot of time rewriting the artist descriptions. As a writer, you have a vision of the page. How you communicate that vision will determine how satisfied you are with each page. As I mentioned before, I write in full script which means I am listing panels and descriptions. However, I want the artist to exert their creativity. They are in charge of imagery so I wanted to make sure that their voice was heard. What I have discovered is that if you want something done in a timely fashion you have two options; tell them exactly what to draw or give them a very broad outline and let them go nuts. Those two options help to create a third and final option.
Over time you develop an understanding of strength and weaknesses within yourself and your skillsets and your artist. After doing the initial work with Tim and John I have a much better feel for what they excel at and what they do not. I think they also have an improved understanding of what I am looking for. We got to that point by using both options. Some items were tightly scripted while others, especially the logo and some of the character sketches were left to the artist’s musings.
So they have the story and now we need to see what they will look like.
Next Time…The Characters
Labels: christopher, Comic Book Publishing, hill, john, lai, primordium, tim, watson
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