Battling technology :: process

At the beginning of this year, I decided it was time to have a dedicated space and new, updated equipment to work on the new book, so I rented studio space, bought a brand new Mac Pro and Wacom Cintiq, and upgraded to Photoshop CS3. When everything arrived, I set it all up in the new studio space only to discover that the Photoshop brushes looked like absolute crap. Unusable. What was the reason for this? I still have not figured it out after hours and hours of settings manipulation, systems admin testing, posts on various message boards and forums and phone conversations with tech advisors at Adobe and Wacom (too see more of what I'm talking about you can look at this thread on the Adobe forums).

It may be the new higher quality Cintiq is showing how bad Photoshop is as a drawing program....or maybe it's Apple's Leopard OS (which is the ONLY OS that can be installed on new macs, BTW - not backwards compatible with older OSes. Incredibly frustrating)...or maybe it's a bug in CS3...or a combination of any of the two or three, etc etc.

But I soldier on. All the new equipment is back in its respective box, and I am back on old equipment until a solution is found.

So that said, I'm working to find new ways to make Cora's linework look better than R&I without spending a gajillion hours feathering every line at 200% actual size. The standard hard round brush wasn't working for me anymore, and what I've found is the opacity jitter setting in the brush dynamics menu. The images below show that brush (top image) vs. the hard brush (bottom image).


opacity jitter on, set to 1% jitter and affected by pen pressure


standard hard round brush

The opacity brush is more like a pencil and the closest thing I can get to a pressure sensitive line in Photoshop. It's been really great cleaning up hair and facial expressions with the brush. It allows for a looser style yet still looks relatively clean.

Here are some process shots:


layout (first phase), done at 200dpi, with a standard hard round brush (this is done very fast to keep things moving)


rough (second phase), done at 400 dpi, 25-50% of actual size and hard round brush, to help me get closer to actual poses and facial expressions (except in this panel, I lost a bit on Cora's pose in the background, which was better in the layout)


final line (third phase) done at 400dpi, 50-100% of actual size and hard round brush with the opacity brush described above.
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Robert Richardson, ASC

I'm a big fan of cinematographer Robert Richardson's work, and wanted to post some stills from The Horse Whisperer which he shot. I wish I had higher quality images because these do absolutely no justice to the magnificence of what he captured with the camera. I really like the film as well; there are a couple scenes in particular that I keep going back to that I hope to analyze here.

The film has been an influence on my work in Rose and Isabel and also with Cora and was the reason I changed the Cora setting from Texas to Montana, where the majority of The Horse Whisperer takes place.

How he got the snow to refract light like that (in stills #4 & #5) I have no idea. Beautiful. I also really like the figure eight/moebius strip of fences in still #6.










More Richardson from Horse Whisperer:

Visual Storytelling - All the President's Men

A conversation I had recently with a director revealed (with some embarrassment) that I had not seen this 70's classic starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. So with no hesitation I set to it immediately. Having owned the film on DVD for at least a year it was high time I watched it and it is tremendous. The film is expertly directed by Alan Pakula and Gordon Willis' cinematography is excellent (not to mention the acting and script by William Goldman). One scene in particular really jumped out at me visually so I chose to break it down.

The basic story is of two reporters (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein played by Redford and Hoffman) who are investigating a possible government conspiracy relating to the Watergate break-in in 1972. In the scene below, Bernstein (Hoffman) goes to the home of a young woman in order to press her for information. Naturally anyone associated with the conspiracy is going to be tight lipped, which is what Hoffman encounters in the scene.

What's important here are the visual choices made by Pakula and Willis to augment the scene, one that easily could have been a very repetitive and uninteresting series of talking heads in the hands of less competent filmmakers.

The breakdown:


Hoffman enters the home and we see immediately the woman he wants to question, separated from him by the rungs of the staircase. Right off the bat there is a separation between the two; impenetrable, like the bars of a jail cell.


Hoffman moves into position to talk to the woman. What really got me here is how Hoffman is placed in the shot -- he has framed the woman into an incredibly claustrophobic bit of screen real estate. She has been squeezed into a section about 1/100th the size of the frame.


Reverse of Hoffman separated from the woman by the bars. Again this is a visual separation to support the script.


Here Hoffman moves clear of the bars to open the conversation with the woman. A visual progression where the intensity (repeating pattern of the bars) has been lowered.


Reverse of the woman clear of the bars, but she is still not revealing anything.


Hoffman returns behind the bars and sits on the couch, trying to prompt a reaction from the woman.


The woman remains behind the bars, confined to her small space. Standoff.


Hoffman chooses to wait it out. Note the lighting of the living room here, because it will change as the scene progresses.


Hoffman has waited the woman out, she loses the game and comes out from behind the bars. A huge turning point in the scene, done visually.


The woman enters the living room and takes a seat across from Hoffman. Note the lighting has changed dramatically from before; her side of the room is now much darker and colder. She is casting a heavy shadow. This continues the visual progression in the scene; where before the progression was with line and shape (bars), now it is done with tone (light and shadows).


Hoffman resumes his questioning; note he is on the dark side of the couch.


Hoffman is served a cup of coffee and he moves to the light side of the couch (another progression of tone) next to the lamp.
What has been set up now is a classic interrogation scene. Hoffman asking the questions with a strong single light source over his shoulder.


Continuation of the interrogation scene, where the woman is lit by one source and casting a heavy shadow. The camera has pushed in on her, increasing the intensity. The questioning resumes in these two shots until the final shot.


Final shot of the scene - the woman has given Hoffman a lot of information regarding the case he is trying to build, but still manages to keep some of it hidden from him. This is reperesented (along with her requested anonymity) by the lamp which covers her face. I love this ending shot, it's a bold choice and speaks volumes.
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Catty for a cause

UPDATE: Progress shots and final piece now added.

Ok, so I lied. The sketch a few posts down isn't going to be the eventual piece up for auction, but rather this one here:

This is the digital sketch for the actual auction piece. I wanted to do something that was a bit more familiar, plus I'm a Catwoman fan. I'm inking it now and wrestling with a way to color it in the hopes of somehow coming close to the sketch below. I consulted a couple of the guys here at the studio and got some really great information on their process and how they approach a piece. This image could be the beginning of a long road back to traditional media for me which I'm excited about.

The auction is this Saturday, info is here.

Digital sketch:



Here are the process shots:


This first one I was experimenting with watercolor and acrylic. The watercolor is on the right and is just a test section of the couch. I felt it was lacking intensity color wise. On the left side is the acrylic; I liked the flatness of the tones, but since it's opaque, I would not be able to trace off the ink lines on the light box. It would require either a transfer of the drawing or a "winging it" approach, recreating the drawing by eye. I didn't feel comfortable with either of those options at the time, so I went for test two.


The second test was done with Tria markers; they're alcohol based and would easily pull up the ink into a muddy mess so I laid down blocks of color first and then inked over it on the light box. The problem with this was it was hard to see the ink lines through the darker areas (such as the purple on the couch). Again, I liked the flatness of the tones.


This third test is what I eventually went with; a combination of watercolor and Dr. Marten's concentrated water color. This turned out to be the best way since I could ink the drawing on the light box, then watercolor directly over the ink lines. The concentrated watercolor added the intensity that I wanted. The major issue here for me was the toothiness of the paper...it didn't have enough to grab the liquid and it tended to pool in areas, got pushed around by the brush, and eventually dried uneven. So for this technique, that is the area that needs a bit more exploration. The concentrated water color also dries very fast which makes gradients and transitions tricky.

Well, the final turned out a LOT different than the original digital sketch...this was the first actual traditional color media work I've done in a very long time and I learned a lot from it. It was definitely not easy and there were a couple of times when I thought I was going to bail out of the whole endeavor. But it's done and I'm happy with it.


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Homework

Here are a couple of books I'll be reading for reference while I write and draw CORA. The first one (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier) I spotted this morning on the Chronicle's home page of news stories -- the storyline grabbed me immediately, first because of its subject matter and incredible reception among reviewers and second for how it might contribute to further backstory for Rose and Isabel that has not been depicted yet (CORA will will be told in several interwoven time periods, from the time of Adam, to the birth of Rose and Isabel in 1842, their early childhood, the later War years 1864-1865, to the time between the Rose and Isabel book and CORA [1869-1888] and beyond).



The second (Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing) I found after a search for well reviewed books on the topic of coercion, persuasion and brainwashing which, at its center, will be what CORA is about. There is a well known mantra among writers to "write what you know", but in this case I am writing about what I don't know but plan to place characters that I am now very familiar with into situations that will further define them.



I can't express how much this kind of research helps me. It helps expand my knowedge of subjects that I may have a narrow or generalized view of. Research not only makes our work better, but helps us become more learned as well.

Reference and Emotion

I have used quite a bit or reference material in the making or Rose and Isabel and now Cora, but I must admit I'm not using enough. Too often I find myself trying to wing it and ending up with results that are inferior to what I could have come up with had I used reference.

Take the pic above for example; this was one of the ones I used to help me represent the anguish expressed by the two sisters in the Rose and Isabel book. Often times there is a tendency to rely on stock expressions or preconceived notions of what emotions look like on the face and they tend to be one dimensional. When someone is sad or crying, do the eyebrows always tilt back and the mouth point downward into a clownlike frown? Not really. It's very complex what happens when the face contorts to represent emotions. What I noticed about the expression above is that the eyebrows are pointing down, as if on an angry face, the mouth curls in both directions, up and down, almost adding a bit of an odd smile to the mix and the hair is falling across as well; details that would not necessarily have occured to me had I not looked at this film still.

These combinations are not only just true of the extreme emotions either; a subtle face can convey any number of complex feelings. The slightest tilt in an eyebrow (and I'm not talking the cocked eyebrow combined with the slightly crooked smile that you see on a million character's faces when they say "hey baby, what's happenin'?"); the slightest tilt of an eybrow or lilt of a head or how the eyelids are (specifically the bottom lid) can mean a TON of things; most of which are combinations of emotions that don't fall into the general categories.

When I was drawing the comics, I tried very hard to avoid purely happy,sad,angry, etc. faces. There is something behind those emotions that bring them to the front -- is the anger caused by frustration? boredom? ego? I try to find out what it is before putting it on the face and using reference is a great way to acheive it.

Here is an early sketch of Rose holding her brother at the end of the story that I really liked, but this particular shot never made its way into the final book.

Storyboard Study: Action

Here's another of those storyboard breakdowns I did a while back. This is part of one of my favorite action scenes, the attack on a caravan in Clear and Present Danger (directed by Philip Noyce).

I wanted to break it down to try and get into the director's head because this scene is very entertaining and very clear, two things you don't find together very often in action scenes today. These boards read across the page, not up and down like in The Gift board study.

Of special note is the 180 degree camera rotation in the third row. It's a great move, and introduces the bad guy. The 180 spin really tells us someting is going to happen that is not the norm; a perfect usage of WHY to go over the 180 line (see the "Over the Line" post).

Also note the low angle on page 2, row 2; this is another big moment where the imposter shoots the real motorcycle cop.
The close up in row 4 shows us the determination on the bad guy's face; he has succeded in infiltrating the caravan. These three moments are the key bits of storytelling in this short section and the shots tell us this.

When I get around to it, I'd really like to draw up and break down the second half of the scene...

Storyboard Study - Building Suspense in "The Gift"

I did this exercise a few years ago while watching Sam Raimi's "The Gift". There's a scene in there that has a really nice dramatic and suspenseful build to it, so I decided to break it down into shots to figure out what made it work. This is a really great exercise for anyone who is interested in storyboarding or what makes a good scene work. I learned quite a bit from it.

Note the shot economy: there are only 12 total shots in the scene.

(the progression on each page is from top to bottom on the left side, then top to bottom on the right side.)