Moving past the cliche, the plan is where any endeavour begins. I had an idea in my head that I was going to make the Adaptation animation a set of short scenes or stills, now the big questions came.
How long will it go for? How many stills or frame do I want? What kind of drawing am I after?
The Plan
I figure that a minute is as good a time to aim for. Too short, there isn’t enough time to get stuff on the screen. Too long, it’ll drag out. That, and I’ve a very limited time resource up my sleeve. Pretty much to the end of the year.
A minute. Slice that up into arbitrary pieces and that gives about ten six second shots or six ten second shots. Which means I’ve just committed to drawing up at least six scenes. Sheesh. At least that answers the second question.
What about the type of drawing? Well, it’s sci-fi, so slick would be nice, but I can’t draw slick. I do scruffy. I also don’t colour stuff in a lot, mostly black and white, or pencils or charcoal, that kind of thing. Then again…
There was a time, way back when, back when the magpies gorbled in the morning sun and I could ride my bike across paddocks, that I would draw line art with a mouse, fill with blocks of colour and then air-brush to lighten or shade the regions. Tada! Artwork!
Of course, I couldn’t print them out. Bubble jet printers were a few years away, and printing a full page image on a black ink 9 pin dot matrix is a torture left for the fourth circle of Hell. Ah, memories.
So… the Plan?
Right, sorry. I figure I’ll pick up where I left off, draw my scruffy black and white images, scan them into the magic electron shuffler and colour them in the old fashioned way. That’ll keep it handmade.
The next part of my plan is the scenes. I don’t think even-Steven timing is the go, but I’ll need to get, as I mentioned before, at least six scenes / drawings to play with, from different parts of the story:
- Ryan assaulting Henry underneath the maglev controller
- Penelope putting forth her questions to Ottavio
- The troops storming the Sanitation facility
- Lucas’ scouting the ruins, seeing the two figures disappear
- Master Pietro discovering the body of Brother Harris
- Father Abraham revealing himself to Ryan and Kahira
- Pan’s torture by the Rags, with Ottavio and Simon watching on
- Cassandra pleading with Ottavio not to leave
- Professor Jung’s demonstration to the Board
- Brother Janus, Sister Hanifé and Ottavio’s emancipation
- And there’s Ali, and Emily, and Norbert and Lucas and Masters Theodore and Jacob and Marcus, of course…
Ahhh, great. So many choices. Well, the good thing is that there’s plenty of material. The bad thing is that this poor shmuck is going to be busy with his pencil, mouse and eyeballs to create all the assets required.
Might as well get cracking. I’ll post as I go. If I’m not back before Christmas, send out a search party <breathes deeply>…