Making Of |
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If you're interested in how Halloween 2k4 was made, here you can see into the 1-month-long development process. You can click on the images with a border expand them. Have fun reading!
After the plot was discussed and on paper, we started to plan the first few pages and what should happen there. In the end we had a script, just like they have for movies. It is important to get a general idea, mainly when it gets more complicated plot-wise and the location changes frequently.
The next step was drawing storyboards for all 20 pages. Sometimes there are large differences between them and the final layout, because you often get new ideas later...
Then we needed borders for the panels. We didn't draw them by hand, but simply printed them using Excel. They look good enough and it's a very quick way to do it.
Finally, we could begin to draw! On most pages we drew the characters and the backgrounds separately. They can easily be put on top of each other in Photoshop and mistakes can be erased out without damaging finished parts. Erased? Yes, we drew the final lines with pencils, even though you wouldn't notice. Normally, comics are first sketched with pencils and then inked. To make it look like ink, we used some Photoshop magic. This also saved time and extra work. Here are some particularly nice pages before coloring:
When a page is ready, it can be scanned in and gets some "color"! First the traces of erased lines are removed, the contrast is adjusted etc. and afterwards some shapes are selected under the line art, which are used for shading. This step can be exhausting when there are complicated shapes to select. The most important panels get special attention, like these:
Written by Stefan Grassberger |
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At the end of September we first thought about how we should tackle this project. It became clear that we would have no more than 1 month to draw and color 20 comic pages. To get by, we had to resort to our old methods. A few zombie sketches and some ideas were at hand, but we needed a story. We found time to figure out one at an English language week in Malta.
Of course it was not always possible to complete a page under pressure and still make it look acceptable. Pages 6, 7 and 8 for example are pretty boring to draw (or even to read?), and that's way they didn't turn out as pretty.
Now that the pages are fully shaded, you might think the comic is done. Wrong, because this is where the fun part starts. The speech bubbles need to be written digitally this time. For the first edition, Kristof managed to letter all the pages in 2 days and think up names for the sound effects!
When we came to the copy shop on day before release, we were exhausted and tired. Let's print! After 5 paper jams and 60 misprints we finally had 30 copies of our comic on paper. They had a fascinating stitching machine that quickly got the job done.