How It's Made: A Wolf's Cry

It's time to take a look behind the scenes at the current page of The Rabbit and the Moon. This is the first page of the new chapter A Wolf's Cry. You'll get to see the script for this page, the pencils, storyboards, and final art.

Script

1a. Hana wakes up. She's kinda groggy. Her eyes are half closed. 1b. She looks at her hands and moves them a bit. 2. Right in front of her is the wolf and she goes wide-eyed. The wolf is asleep. We can see the sky and it's dark now. This is the big establishing shot. 3a. Hana tries to creep away. 3b. When she thinks she's made it, she goes to stand up but the wolf grabs her collar.

Storyboards

Looking back, one of the issues I have with this page is probably the long frame in the middle where she jumps down. That should probably be the establishing shot but I choose to focus up close on Hana first and then widen it out. It might be hard to see what she's wide-eyed about, but maybe that works as a decent lead-in?

Pencils

You can see I totally cheated on the establishing shot. If you look closely you might even see where I got that image from. It's actually a screenshot taken from Google Earth. I never explicitly say what city Hana and Natsumi live in (i.e. where Kamiko is from), but the city there is Mito, Japan. I visited there in 2009; I had a friend who was working as a JET there and so mentally I've always thought of them living in a city like Mito, although it's not quite. The final artwork is actually only partially indicative of the screenshot I took. I used it to get the general size of the houses and some of them are traced over, but half of it is also just abstract shapes that look like buildings. I liked the roadways and the river that cut through. I added lights as well to make it look more like a nighttime shot.

Also, the town Hana and Natsumi live in can't be near Mito, because Mito isn't by the ocean. They live in a town that's in a valley and hugs the ocean.

Final Art

That's all for this installment of How It's Made. I think the next page is really cool, so stay tuned. :)