Seriously, the process starts with any piece of paper I can find and any
writing materials at hand. Usually I'll start with a receipt from buying
a book or coffee and scribble down some ideas. The ideas germinate for a
few days, ending up in one of the drawing/sketching notebooks I carry with
me almost everywhere I go. I don't use any particular notebook - in fact,
just before I finish a notebook I try to find a completely different kind
for my next one. Xiao Dreamweaver's Livebook has the same form factor as
a black sketchbook I picked up at
Barnes and Noble
a year or so back; since then, I've
moved on to a Drawing/Writing notebook from
Michael Roger Press
that I picked up from
Binder's
on a recent art supply buying spree.
The kind of notebook doesn't matter - the only thing I've found I really
need is a notebook large enough to carry 8.5 by 11 printer paper.
Once an idea has taken hold, I try to find a piece of music to help me
think it out; for f@nu fiku that's included The Matrix Revolutions
soundtrack, Darwa: More Life More Trouble, the Superman soundtrack,
Sandra Collins' remix of Junkie XL, and Evanescence. Eventually, the
plot jells, and I write the script in
Microsoft Word.
The next key phase is turning the script into a storyboard.
The key inspiration for me was a comic book artist who
gave a talk at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2002 and 2003,
who divided artists into two kinds: real artists and BS artists.
Real artists create art - BS artists just talk about the art
they want to create.
More to come:
- the script format
- the storyboard book
- storyboard blowups
- the little and big black books
- the layouts
- inked pages
- scanning
- cleaning
- lettering and effects
- the rants
- postproduction with Eclipse, Ant, Python and fiku.py
- ftp
- QA