How It's Made: A Voice in the Woods - 3

In this installment of How It's Made, we'll take a look at A Voice in the Woods - 3's pencils, storyboards, and script.

I decided to change the order up so that it would make more sense. In the past I put the pencils up top above the cutoff so that it would be the image that shows on the front page, but now that there's a splashier image from the comic, I'll reorganize these sections to better reflect the creative process: from word to image.

Script

1a. Jade and Natsumi make an exchange. Jade: Girl, do you still have the vial? Natsumi: So what if I do? Jade: Give it over.

1b. Close up on Kamiko as Jade talks to her. Jade: (O.S.) God Child, take it back to my mistress and feed it to her. Then remove her from the moon and you’re free to do whatever you please. 2a. Jade with a sour expression on his face. Kamiko: (O.S.) As much as I’d like too, but I have to save this dummy and her sister. Jade: I can— Kamiko: They’re my responsibility too! 2b. There’s a scream in the woods. (SFX: AHHHH!! (use a jagged bubble)) Natsumi: Hana!! 3. Natsumi runs out of the shrine and Jade and Kamiko follow after her.

When I break the story up into frames per page, I try to imagine in my head what each frame should be while in the scripting stage. When I actually go to storyboard, some of these just don't translate well or I think they're too weak. In the next sections I'll talk more about the break down from word to image.

Storyboards

In the case of this page, I felt that 1b was a weak idea for a frame (the second frame). The script called for a close up on Jade, but I wanted to re-establish where all the characters were standing and where they were so that they weren't just floating in space. I thought to use the down below shot again that I did for the hole and that's why you see that version, which I forgot to hide when I made the image for the storyboards. The problem was that it was too repetitive and wasn't enough to establish where they were to one another. The next version I started with the location of the hole and then build the characters around that so that we can see that Kamiko is standing inside the shrine facing outwards and Jade is in the middle. Presumably that would leave Natsumi standing with her back to the door even though I omitted her from the frame in the final art (see the pencils below).

I also broke frame 2a up into two frames. The first one points from Kamiko's POV to Natsumi, which I think should reinforces where Natsumi is to the rest of them. The next frame is a close up on Kamiko for her retort to Jade. It's something important to Kamiko (to protect her younger self and Hana and I wanted to go close up to get her expression).

With the last frame, I resorted to Blender. I had tried drawing the perspective, but I wasn't able to get the foreshortening the way I wanted and I was getting frustrated with my attempts. In that case, and since I don't want to dwaddle on things, I resorted to using my composition tools in Blender. I brought in mannequins into the Yayoi shrine model and set up a camera and took some time to arrange the poses and camera angle.

Pencils

 

I went chibi with the "AIEEE" frame. Honestly, it just seemed to make sense. I still wonder if stylistically it makes sense since everything is serious and then you get a chibi frame that breaks you out of that serious/realisitic form of art the other frames have. I don't know if that's jarring, but if jarring is what I wanted, then the words and images reinforce that.

I guess I also went chibi with Natsumi's expression in the frame before.

Final Art

 

The wood grain texture is fun but time consuming to do. I still draw it by hand using the G-pen. When you only have one color my next resort it to rely on texture to give things their sense of shape so it's not just entirely a white block of space.

That's all for this week's installment of How It's Made. If you have any questions or want to leave a comment, please do so below and I'll definitely answer you back.