Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A little glimpse inside my comic creation process

Working on Comic

This screenshot from the wee hours of this morning shows some of the tools I'm using to put together the upcoming comic on Night's tale of romantic loss and fulfillment.

The window on the right containing images of Majic at her laptop is from Adobe Bridge. Since I take a lot of shots during a scene, it's really good to have a program that lets me quickly get a good look at each shot. I use Photoshop for image manipulation and Comic Life Magiq for the comic layout.

Comic creation with Second Life is challenging becuase there are visual glitches in most shots. Either a hand is poking into someone's back, fingers look like breadsticks or a limb is bent in an unnatural way. Although I try to set up each shot to avoid the most obvious issues, I've found that it still makes sense to overshoot, and take photos from many angles.

For instance, what seems like a perfectly good image in the first shot, is upon closer inspection marred by a painful looking finger through the palm. The best solution is to find an animation without the problem. Otherwise, either framing or post-production image manipulation can turn this into a usable shot.


hands

That's all I have time for today. I'm putting together a presentation on using Second Life as a platform for visual storytelling and comic creation, so I'll be throwing out some draft items here along the way.

3 comments:

Keaira Skytower said...

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I hate when I get a really nice shot and then I notice the bad angle of a knee cap (or lack thereof) that just throws off the shot and it'd take more work that it's worth to make it look right.

Not that I do anything near what you do :) Your comic looks so cool.

Vidal Tripsa said...

Awesome stuff! Thank you very much for sharing, Botgirl honey. ^_^

Mchilly said...

Nice work, amazing!