The Making of The LFirst I read a lot of books and get ideas about stuff like guns to put in the story.
Then I watch a lot of movies for scenes that are really cool to redo.
There are jokes that need to go in if the narrators are involved, because nothing they say is serious (if you've noticed by now).
Somewhere along the line I actually begin to write stuff. I'll try to do a script for a whole chapter if I can, but chapters are all indeterminate length and scenes are written whenever the hell I think of them, so page notation is something like X1, X2 (the Lilith scene, at the end of Chapter Twelve), 2.1, 2.2, 7x, etc. I figure out where scenes go later. A lot of later scenes have much better scripts, because stuff actually happens, but since I have yet to upload or even finish most of those pages, I'm stuck showing you the boring scene with the narrators witty banter, pages 64 and 65.
The dialogue is almost always written first, because dialogue is the stuff that has to go in no matter what. I
must make room for it, even if I have to fudge it. I think about what all the characters say and do all the voices out loud so I'm sure it resembles natural speech (mostly while walking around). Then I make drawerings of the page layout as so:
MOST of this will never see the light of day. Tons will be cut out to make it all fit. Some will be made into "Supplemental" pages (although most supplemental pages are written specifically AS supplemental pages and the name is just a marketing gimmick).
Then I get out a ruler and paper and try to recreate what I thought of as best it can fit actual reality. Each panel takes about an hour to draw whether it's super detailed or just something stupid and simple, and since there's usually 6 or 7 panels per page that means it takes about 9 to 10 hours to draw each page by hand because half the time I mess up and have to redraw it on a separate page and edit it in later on the computer.
At least half of what you see is done on the computer. A single panel can have five or more separate hand drawn elements and just as many computer drawn elements all composited together. Directions like what needs to be changed, added, removed, backgrounds, and text are written in, so each raw page (labled as "64r" and "65r" in this case) is kind of like a storyboard really, and the most detailed and complicated storyboard I've ever done. It's also where I add the wobbly borders and mirror written hidden messages.
Action, poses, props, settings, backgrounds, all that stuff is almost always fit AROUND the dialogue. Unless it's vital that someone gets gutted or brained or sexed, I figure all that stuff out later. It's kind of the reverse of how the original Spider Man comics were made, where the pages were all drawn and when they were finished the dialogue was monkey wrenched to fit the action (which is why a lot of the time people are doing stuff really cool and saying stuff really stupid, because text bubbles were drawn before anyone knew what text would go in them, so you end up with people saying very unnatural things in weird situations).
I try to make the text area larger than it needs to be because I don't do hand lettering except with a few words that need to look
just right (like when Rane says "Don't" on page 64), and the page numbers themselves. When I actually type out the final dialogue a good deal will be changed so measuring out the text boxes means nothing and everything is fit as best as I can.
Since this is just about scripting and thumbnailing I won't go into any more detail about how all the above is turned into this:
This might bite me in the ass later.
