Continuing on from my previous post about My Very Own Comic Book…
I began by writing a little flash fiction which had a beginning and something resembled an ending, but I didn’t know what went in the middle. Or how much room I had to work with in the middle.
I think it would have been frustrating if I really cared. But as I mentioned in the original post, I don’t care all that much. I’m not going for success. I’m going for completion.
I visited a few websites that gave me an idea of what a comic book script looks like.
These were helpful in the sense that I learned I would need to figure out a format that would work form my story, and that could only be acquired through experience. But how do I convert a (fragmented) story into a script?
Up to this point my plan was to 1) write a story 2) hand it off to an artist 3) receive images back from the artist 4) assemble comic book 5) Share 6) Learn what I did wrong. As you can imagine, for step 2 to succeed I need to finish step 1. And in order for me to complete step 1 I needed a foundation. More like an idea of a layout.
Instead of obsessing about what I should be doing, I opted for what I could be doing.
So I opened up Draw from LibreOffice and assembled 6 pages of frames, without any real idea of how the plot would integrate into the frames or the pages.
I numbered the frames on each page in order to help me adapt the gibberish I’ve written into a script. I will probably be rearranging the layout in order to fit with the plot.
Here is the 6 page layout for anyone who is interested (red frames are frameless scenes). I recommend setting your pdf reader to display two pages at a time.
An important part of this project is to listen to people who care deeply about this storytelling medium.
Please let me know in the comments if I am making any rookie mistakes, or if there is anything on the web that you have found helpful.
Issue 47 