working as a writer/artist team.

el_tiddlero

Hey all,
congrats on the new production forum.. some interesting resources + info so far..

To the point - my overly ambitious self and my equally ambitious friend have begun the process of writing a graphic novel together.. I'm the words and story man and he's the pictures man. Obviously we've both talked a lot about how to approach the project and so forth, but i guess i'm just looking for advice from anyone who's gone down this road before to maybe point out some of the more glaring pitfalls that we might encounter...

Now, at present i've got a lot of the tale mapped out etc, but i'm not too sure of how much he's going to need to go on to start working.. My main fear is that he'll end up drawing millions of stuff that will never get used - and as its supposed to be something fun to do i don't want him to feel overworked and give up.

Would you reccomend that the story be completely sewn up and finished before he begins, or do you think that having him do sketches of earlier parts of the tale could prove beneficial to my filling in the gaps in the story that exist at present..

I know a lot of this kind of stuff is basically down to the individual preferences of the people working on it, but i'd be interested to hear what you would do/want if you were involved in a writer/artist pairing..

cheers
Liam

Fysh

I have tried to collaborate with a couple of friends on comics before, although nothing has materialised out of those attempts so far. Obviously the big thing is to discuss how you want to approach it, but I suspect that by necessity you'll end up with a significant amount of art that's unused.

So long as your friend doesn't find this disheartening or too much of a workload it's not a problem; you can use it as a way to flesh out your story and the setting it's based in, as well as the characters. You'd be surprised what can come of brainstorming together both in terms of story elements and visual aspects.

(Bear in mind, the advice of people who've seen such projects through to collaboration is likely to be near-infinitely more useful than the above...)

el_tiddlero

Fysh wrote: »

I have tried to collaborate with a couple of friends on comics before, although nothing has materialised out of those attempts so far. Obviously the big thing is to discuss how you want to approach it, but I suspect that by necessity you'll end up with a significant amount of art that's unused.

hmm, i had a feeling that's what someone would tell me.. I've had a few previous attempts at this kind of thing before which came to nothing in the end alright - i had one where i just had my own crude drawings as the script (storyboards i suppose) and i thought that might make it easier for the artist, but in the end they just kind of lost interest as they didn't feel they could change too much.. that's why for this one i just want to write the story and let him draw it the way he sees it..

Fysh wrote: »

So long as your friend doesn't find this disheartening or too much of a workload it's not a problem; you can use it as a way to flesh out your story and the setting it's based in, as well as the characters. You'd be surprised what can come of brainstorming together both in terms of story elements and visual aspects.

that's true - if i put it to him like that it may not seem like as much of a waste.. its just a lot easier for me as a writer to scribble out a paragraph here and there and add new ones.. and i suppose seeing pictures of the characters etc could lead to me having a better idea of how they should behave too..

Fysh wrote: »

(Bear in mind, the advice of people who've seen such projects through to collaboration is likely to be near-infinitely more useful than the above...)

sure thanks anyway man, every little helps (as tesco say) and even just getting a second opinion on things can help me to firm up my own ideas on how to approach it..

Lone Stone

The easyist way for your friend who is going to be drawing out would probaly be if you just have say a chapter of the story the way you want it pass it onto him for him to start drawing it out while you start to write up the next part , because it does sound like a lot for one person to draw up and be prepeard for a lot of burn out well that may not be an issue but i always get burned out and just dont do anything for weeks

I think you would have to leave a lot of the way the scenes will look up to your friend but it would be good to sit down and talk through what you have written so far and talk about how you want each scene to look angles etc.

good luck with it il be looking forward to a sneak peek :P this post probaly didnt help you at all tho haha im useless me

el_tiddlero

Lone Stone wrote: »

if you just have say a chapter of the story the way you want it pass it onto him for him to start drawing it out while you start to write up the next part

good luck with it il be looking forward to a sneak peek :P this post probaly didnt help you at all tho haha im useless me

yeah i was thinking of the chapter by chapter approach alright - i suppose anything we can do to break it down into manageable chunks is bound to help.. I'm pretty sure its going to end up being a long and painful process, i mean i have the bones of the story laid out but that's really only the tip of the iceberg.. the real work hasn't even started yet.. :eek:

ah man, like i said to Fysh, every little helps.. i'm also looking forward to a sneak peek ... we're meeting up this week to talk timetables and stuff, so who knows we could have a page or two done by the end of the month with some luck!

magwea

Thumbnails my friend, specifically your thumbnails.

If your friend is going to be in charge of just the pictures, as you said, the story as a whole is going to your priority, and ultimately the merit of the entire project, in the end who wants just pretty pictures anymore. Thumbnails are going to force you to only follow fleshed out ideas, this is not going to be the easiest route for you considering your past experience.

Don't mistake your artist as your concept artist, storyboard artist and also cartoonist all of which are difficult enough in their own right, especially if your scared of him being overworked. If your the more ambitious one, this is your job, give your friend as much information as possible while still involving him in the stories creative process, but only to a point.

Any chance of seeing some concept posted, for the intrigued?

ztoical

It really comes down to the writer and artist and how they work both on their own and together. I've done work with people who liked the whole process to be collabrative and it can be slower as you have to wait till you can meet up so you need to very organised and I've done work with people who I've never meet in person, they just email their script and leave it at that.

For something like a graphic novel I would rec doing it collabratively to start, get together and work out the character bibles, designs, and the over all layout style you both are happy with. Getting the style of the characters down is a big help as you find when working on something for a long time your style starts to change and there's nothing worse then having the start of the book look nothing like the end of the book.

When animated films are being developed the story is written down very roughly as a story not a script - key scenes are picked out and storyboarded [thumbnailed] and pinned up on the wall so you can see straight away if the piece is working as a whole - I mean its great to have one or two fantastic pages but its not about the parts its about the whole package. Then the script and storyboard are developed together at the same time. Now obviously its harder to work that way when its just two people and not a whole animation studio but I've found if I spend the time on the thumbnails and roughs the actually finished art comes pretty fast - whats the old saying "measure twice, cut once".

What helps sometimes with comics is to take the rough pencils [they can be as rough as stick men if you like] and make up a dummy book - have all the pages in the order your going to print them and flick through it - comics are an interactive medium in that the reader has to turn the page and you'll see flicking through a dummy book if parts aren't working - the right hand side page is the first page you see when turning a page even thou the left side page is the next one to be read so any big reveals/shocks/twist etc should be on the right hand page so when the reader turns the page they get that "Ohhhhh shock/excitment/whatever buzz"

I know some people like to use the one page at a time approach but I dislike this method as I feel it ruins the over all flow, energy and movement of the art - its very hard to plan your design and layout if you don't know whats coming next. You either find yourself using the same shots over and over cus you didn't know where it would work best or you end up redrawing pages you've finished cus they now don't work with the new pages.

If you watch the Moebius doc I posted in the main comics forum there is a section near the end where Stan Lee and Moebius take about how they worked together for the silver surfer. Lee writes the story as a story not a script, Moebius did rough pencils for it and Lee using them wrote the script.

You are always going to find yourself doing too much and having to cut stuff. Thats actually the part that lets alot of people down. People become attached to sections that no longer work with the whole book cus they like it or put so much effort in that they won't take it out and it ends up bringing the whole piece down.


right that kinda went rambling all over the place, hope some of it made sense.

el_tiddlero

magwea wrote: »

Thumbnails my friend, specifically your thumbnails.
Thumbnails are going to force you to only follow fleshed out ideas, this is not going to be the easiest route for you considering your past experience.

by this you mean i need to almost have it laid out frame by frame is it? well i guess i knew it was gonna be a truck load of work... ..i can see what you mean about only using fully developed ideas though, stop all that tangenital stuff that you can get bogged down in when writing anything..

magwea wrote: »

Don't mistake your artist as your concept artist, storyboard artist and also cartoonist all of which are difficult enough in their own right, especially if your scared of him being overworked. If your the more ambitious one, this is your job, give your friend as much information as possible while still involving him in the stories creative process, but only to a point.

cheers, i hadn't even thought of that.. i suppose we're both a bit naieve about the whole thing and are just thinking in terms of "i'll write it, you draw it".. which, while that is essentially what will happen, is quite a simplistic way of looking at it.. hmm, some thinking to be done..

magwea wrote: »

Any chance of seeing some concept posted, for the intrigued?

well we've no art as yet, so no pics for a while i'm afraid, you'll be the first to see though when we do get something done..

as for the story itself: The world is under the control of a single government, 10 states ruled by 10 kings (i like my revelations ) .. the book opens on New Year's Eve and at 12 midnight rebel assassins kill 9/10 of the kings. A detective is called in to investigate the assasinations and through his pursuit of the rebels he becomes sympathetic towards them and even begins to agree with them.. there's some twists and turns along the way, and a killer one at the end (which i can post if you'd really like...) but that's the basic premise.. the detective is the main character, and his struggle between the gratitude he feels for the system that raised him and the new revolutionary ideas that the rebels teach him as he confronts them, is the central tenet of the whole thing.

el_tiddlero

well you may have thought it rambling Ztoical, but there's a lot of awesome advice in there..

ztoical wrote: »

For something like a graphic novel I would rec doing it collabratively to start, get together and work out the character bibles, designs, and the over all layout style you both are happy with. Getting the style of the characters down is a big help as you find when working on something for a long time your style starts to change and there's nothing worse then having the start of the book look nothing like the end of the book.

i'm kind of thinking now that i should just get Ronan (his name, so as to avoid the whole your friend/my friend game we've been playing) to concentrate on drawing the main characters for now while i get cracking on making it easier for him to execute the individual pieces of the story.. once he's happy with how the main people look it should be easier to make them speak properly too (i hate writing dialogue... it always seems to come out lame..)

What helps sometimes with comics is to take the rough pencils [they can be as rough as stick men if you like] and make up a dummy book - have all the pages in the order your going to print them and flick through it - comics are an interactive medium in that the reader has to turn the page and you'll see flicking through a dummy book if parts aren't working - the right hand side page is the first page you see when turning a page even thou the left side page is the next one to be read so any big reveals/shocks/twist etc should be on the right hand page so when the reader turns the page they get that "Ohhhhh shock/excitment/whatever buzz"

I know some people like to use the one page at a time approach but I dislike this method as I feel it ruins the over all flow, energy and movement of the art - its very hard to plan your design and layout if you don't know whats coming next. You either find yourself using the same shots over and over cus you didn't know where it would work best or you end up redrawing pages you've finished cus they now don't work with the new pages.

yeah i can see the points here too.. i suppose its like anything, a mountain of rough work makes for a much sleeker finished product.. it's just so easy when you're starting out with something like this to get caught into thinking that everything should be finished first time.. ah the delusions of ease that come with starting anything new huh, i was almost going to go over to Ronan's later this week with my half-assed story outline and say, "hey buddy, get drawing"
time for some reorganization i think.. i'll give that video a watch later too, sounds pretty interesting..
thanks a million for your help so far folks!!

Fysh

Try not to get too bogged down with trying to do everything at once, I'd say. You know you've got a long form story in mind, but you don't need to have a full script for the entire thing ready before you get someone to start illustrating it.

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to know the core of the story. Have you got all your core characters developed - ie do you know what they look like, what they sound like, what their background is, what they do/don't like etc? Do you have some idea of your chosen environment - not just visually, but what is it like socially, politically, technologically? is it a utopian or dystopian world? Are the streets dirty? Are there homeless people there? And lastly but possibly most importantly, do you know the key beats of your story? You know how it starts and how it ends - what are the core scenes in getting from A to B? Those are what your basic storyboard should consist of.

From the drawing perspective, it has to tie into all of the above but visually. If you want to really annoy your friend who's doing the art, send him to the library or bookshop and get him to look at reference books for certain styles of item (architecture, or technology for example) so that he can put together ideas for designs. Or, if you don't want to overload him, add this to the stuff you need to do.

Once you have that ready, you can start to focus on the individual chapters and start to make some actual comic. You don't even need to do all of the above before starting, but chances are it'll bite you in the ass or cause you to have to stop and/or restart if you decide not to.

ztoical

el_tiddlero wrote: »

yeah i can see the points here too.. i suppose its like anything, a mountain of rough work makes for a much sleeker finished product.. it's just so easy when you're starting out with something like this to get caught into thinking that everything should be finished first time.

I just finished working on an animation project that jumped into production before they'd really finished all the preproduction and it ended up causing such headaches later on. things that should have been worked out before people started animating still weren't resolved months into the production and it resulted in loads of work being binned and redone and wasting alot of time [and in that case wasting alot of money as the animators still had to paid for the work they'd done]

If you can divide time up into Pre-production, production and post production but don't give equal time to each - if you put alot of time into pre-production you'll find the actually production moves more swiftly and that post-production [getting files ready for print] should take no time at all. Make lots of lists and try and resolve as many issues as you can before you start doing tight pencils or inks. Knowing how you want to ink or colour the work will effect how you chose to pencil it - also the style of writing and style of art should effect each other [lots of fast action, speed lines and splash pages don't work with very dialogue heavy scripts and vice versa]. Do research, make up swipe files [plain folders that you dump anything that might be of interest or use for character design, colouring, background design, inking, pictures/images/writing that just inspires you].

Never fall for the trap of "ah it looks alright now but once inked and coloured i'm sure it will be great" if it looks crap as a rough pencil, it will look craped in tight pencils, inks and colours - don't try and fix mistakes at the inking stage, fix them at rough pencils when its far easier. Get feedback, I'm sure there's plenty of people on here who will give you feedback on any pages [art, writing or both] that you wish to post.

But most of all have fun, if you enjoyed doing it, it will come across in the finished piece