Clubbing WIP - Page 3 Thumbnails

The thumbnails for Page 3.

For someone who grew up watching action anime, particularly Dragon Ball Z, I've never gotten quite a hold on drawing action scenes. But no matter what kind of story I try to write, even if it's a long-form purely written work, at some point, there's going to be a very graphic fight scene. I may or may not have said this before, but Dragon Ball Z is one of my original inspirations for becoming a comic artist. Its imagery and storytelling devices are embedded in my mind. Even the proportions I draw for younger children is taken directly from Kid Goku's proportions. I can't escape my roots...

All of that aside, I'm happy with the short action scene that happened here. My main issue (again, Dr. NoScript back there) was that I had no plan for choreography and so was unable to proceed in a reasonable fashion. While I didn't even completely follow my own script here, I had a plan of attack *wry laugh* to guide me. The scene has a more tangible flow to it. Or at least I feel it does. Another one of the many benefits to having a script~

Now, one thing that I'll have to fix in post is how obvious I was towing the 180 degrees line. Long story short, there's a rule in staging, especially film-making, that characters should almost never reverse their basic positions; they can only rotate, so to speak, on a 180-degree line. It's to avoid confusion about who's where. That's why, in the beginning, Sheriff is always on the left with Jay on the left. They never switched sides. The closest they got was both of them being in the center of the panel with Jay in front. However, I needed him on the other side for the latter half of the strip. After that, they don't switch.

That being said, good direction dictates that these rules shouldn't be so noticeable, they become distracting. For me, they are a bit so. A lot of the time, Sheriff looks like he's being smooshed to his side of the panel. Easy enough to fix, but still. Honestly, though, Sheriff and Jay so visually different, I wonder if I ought to be able to dispense with it a bit, given how rigidly I'm holding to it here. I'd think not, seeing as the scenery changes so much, it'd be helpful to show them in the same essential places every time they're shown. At least in the beginning, anyway. It also sort of propels them in the right direction, literally and figuratively. Generally speaking, the 2D (J)RPGs and platformers I've played have characters moving from left to right. They're consistently in the same basic positions, and unless they're at a stop of sorts, they're almost always facing/moving right. Probably just gonna leave it as is.

That's it for this bit. Thanks for reading~

#script #comic #clubbing #jay #sheriff #thumbnails #cartoon #genrechowderstudios