Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Blast from the past 2: Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.


Alright, round 2. [fight.]

Where I left off last time, I had just written my mediocre short story. It was extraordinarily average, so I needed to cut down, crop, enlarge the good moments from it to make it interesting at all.

If you read the last post, the main problem was that I tried to fit too much story in a tiny bit of space, so it ended up being as bad as a bullet pointed list of plot. My answer to this problem was to choose what I thought was the most important part, Kai's action of leaving, and explore this time as thoroughly as possible. The way I did this that I thought would make the images play a crucial part in the story was to not look at my short story at all. Instead, I chose to imagine the concept of leaving and story boarded the images out without any real concept of the text that would fit in.

The result were the following story boards.






After these drawings got cranked out, I found that I had a real framework that I could build from finally. All these images seemed to really click with the first ones that I had produced in my sketchbook way back in August (for those keeping track of the timeline, this storyboard is from the beginning of January.)

After this point, I looked at each page from the story board and started writing my text. I had just started reading Big Sur by Kerouac, and I think Dharma Bums is probably my favorite story. I'm not much of a writer, so I found myself looking a lot at Kerouac's voice hoping to find a role model for myself. For any of you guys who hasn't read much of it, he's got the most beautiful mix of stream of conscious and information, and I'd recommend it with all my heart.

Once text was matched to the images, the main design decision I had left was how to put the text into the pages. This was a major part of my focus paper in the beginning and I had to put a lot of thought into it. The art of David Mack was a major influence when thinking of this. One of the techniques he uses is to just cut out strips of text and put them right amongst the images. I thought this was a brilliant idea, so I decided to stand on the shoulders of giants and just steal it.

During Exams at the end of January, I listened to more this american life than I have in my entire life and got all 32 pages of sketches finished up. Here they are, dads.


















hepyeargh.

3 comments:

  1. yay! i love the text. jack got me on the road for christmas, i've slowly been working through it. good stuff, colin, can't wait to see the new stuff.

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  2. Whoa Collin these sketches are amazing! I really like how it all comes together. keep up the good work- orph

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  3. Colin - I just love seeing all the art spread out like this and on the net - its funny cuz I see it a bit like a relative and all my pride and love goes out towards it! keep up these posts and these blasts from the past the give this beautiful full circle foundation to all you have done!

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