mrcontro asked:
I actually kind of forgot that Tumblr has a Q&A function. So thanks, Tre, for reminding me that
a) This is a thing I have enabled and
b) I should really make some more films.
I do have a project on the go at the moment, a promotional video for the hospital radio station I volunteer at. I had intended to be well into the production stage at this point, but I accidentally got a proper job, and the necessary training has left me short of spare time recently.
Rest assured, it’ll be started (and done) soon. In the meantime, you can watch this video to get an idea of what the end result will look like.
With regards to the comics question, I’ll give a bit of backstory for anyone who only recently started following my Tumblr. In the far-off years of 2006-2008, I drew comics pretty regularly(-ish. I was lousy with even the loosest of schedules). Some of them can be found here, but all of them can be found on my DeviantArt page, a website I still visit daily.
Once I moved away for university/college, I had less time to sit down and draw, but more time to stand up and make films. I didn’t stop making comics entirely, but I found that most of the short scenes I was coming up with worked better in the context of a video. And, given that that was the artistic skill I was looking to develop at the time, I chose to makes film whenever I could.
I’m not sure how much my comic-making skill influences my film-making skill, or vice-versa. I’ve been doing both for almost exactly the same amount of time, and there’s a certain degree of crossover in the way that they’re made (a film’s storyboard is, in essence, the film condensed into a comic strip format), so it’s possible that developing these skills at the same time (if not at the same rate) has led to them influencing one another in some way. Just not in a way that I can consciously recognise (yet).
So, to answer your question of whether I use my “expertise in filmmaking in my comic making”: Probably, but not in a tangible way.
The truth is, I like to tell stories in a visual medium. Films and comics both offer me the opportunity to do that. And while the end results are very different (unless your comic is a flipbook), I realise that there are some visual tricks that can work well in both mediums.
A good example is featured pretty extensively in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke. Whenever the story shifts into or out of a flashback of the Joker’s previous life, it does so by having the two bridging panels resembling each other:
This is known in editing terms as a ‘match cut’. You see it in movies all the time (think of how many times you’ve seen a character’s eye fade into the moon, or the bone-to-ship from 2001), and Alan Moore makes use of it pretty often. It’s an editing device that, if used appropriately (as above), can really make a story flow better between scenes, whether you’re making a film or a comic.
There are other examples like this (I’d post more but this answer post is already WAY too long) that work for both mediums. I don’t think of them as “comic tricks” or “film tips”, just “visual storytelling devices”. And then I focus on telling that visual story as best I can, using them whenever necessary.
Holy shit this turned out long. Felt good to write, though!
ryannorth
