Sintel Comic Book
Joeri Kassenaar has created a comic book version of Sintel.
Joeri writes:Some of you might know this: I’m a Philip K. Dick fan and a Ridley Scott fanatic, his attention to detail is overwhelming. And Dick’s paranoid view on people is very impressive, being a cynical sarcast myself I can feel very much at home in his world. I got impressed with Dust-to-dust. Or at least the iTouch version by Boom. The comic itself is not available out here. Would it not be fun to make something like that? Then there is the iPad alice in wonderland. Have you seen that? I want that, but what to do? Create a book myself, write, draw, animate? In my spare time? And not watch my kids grow up?
It landed on the shelf next to project 2102, 2102b and 2103.
On July 19th I went to the preview of Sintel. I knew it would be hard to get to premiere in my schedule and being a gold sponsor I thought I needed to show my face. Well, uhm. Always good to see Ton again. It was a nice view, but I thought it had some gaps. Being a Martin fan ( I have all his Storms, also the new ones ) I couldn’t see his vision in this film. I had a drunk chat with Esther, who thought I was an ass, to find out I was dissing her story, and not Martins. My mistake.
The last time I was so troubled by a film was with “Dancer in the Dark” by Lars von Trier. I don’t mind a movie not having a happy end, but I do mind a director putting tons of grief upon me without a solution to find relief. The we where not able to discuss the movie online, the premiere had yet to come.
Originally I wanted to fix the problems in the Sintel movie. So when I got the png sequence to author the video dvds I saw a chance to do so. It would also be nice to create content for a virtual book. But while working with the frames I noticed the story is not so bad after all. It’s all there, the movie just needs to be 30 minutes for slow old people like me. A picture book than comes in handy.
Sintel seems to be in the middle of the shot a lot. I have no idea why. Maybe a lot of sky represents loneliness a bit better. But its not how I like to see a cg girl shot. Just google cg girls to see how most people frame a person. So I wanted to deal with that. Use the stage. I planned on 24 pages, but the movie is fully packed with action. And still I had to leave out way too much. My respect for the amount of work put into this piece really grew when making this comic. I did not find one flawed image in the whole movie ( except yeah some non masked hair and in single stepping some weird appearing dust etc. ) But overall the attention to detail is simply amazing and passes way too fast in the movie. The number of sets is impressive for such a short movie. The facial emotions are quite superb. Etc. etc.
Two copies where sent to a printer, but there went something wrong so I could alas not present a copy to Ton at the BConf. I guess santa will have a nice present for him this year.
This is a static version, and made a pdf that you can print if you like to. Any ideas on how to get the version interactive would be great. Maybe add Jan’s music.
Anyway, I thought I might share the pages I made with other Sintel fans. Maybe Martins publisher wants to print it? lol.
Enjoy.
Joeri Kassenaar
Links
Very nice! Quite a bit of detail that did go by unnoticed became apparent in this book. Great work :)
Awesome!!, but I have to say, is difficult to read, the typography makes you shrink your eyes a lot. But good work.
Nice job. but a comic book without onomatopeia is not a comic book :P
I’m also with Niyado, typography could be better.
Anyway, my thanks to Joeri, it is always nice to collect more stuff based on things you admire like Sintel :)
Which tools have you used to create the book?
I think this is a great start, there are a few layout issues, but I like what you did with some of the shots (like the one where Sintel passes out in the snow). I think I agree with your assessment of the the story it converts very nicely to a picture book, and as you dont have the same conception of time as you would in a film the story does appear to take longer.
I would love to see an animated comic (2D style) with a story teller perspective (narration).
D.
http://issuu.com/stickr/docs/sintel?mode=embed&viewMode=presentation&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Fwood2%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true&pageNumber=2
Meh. This is basically just a picture book with a few text scribbles here and there. :/
@dotblend: cool ! ( needs flash though, so not for ipad )
I think you could make this into a proper comic book, with background information, narrative etc. would be a big undertaking :)
Could probably get some other scenes from the community?
@ joery did you try on a ipad?
it works on my iphone…
if you give me the source file’s i’ll make a ipad version
It’s okay for a “screenshot” comic. I think it would have been nicer if there were more curves in the frames. As it is, each comic book frame is a box. Am not a designer, but I think some of the insets (frame within a frame?) would look better as ovals.
Assuming the reader has never seen the movie, I think there’s quite a bit more gaps in this than the movie itself. For example, the transition between where the dragon is taken to Sintel’s journey, there’s no context as to what’s happening. There needs to be some caption to say what’s going on throughout the comic – especially since that’s the thing to do in comics is to have narrative caption boxes.
@ Noobody:
Yep, there are 100+1 styles. But I did say I liked the dust-to-dust style. Pictures on black.
Most comics have the black-border on white paper framing. Square boxes is pretty standard on comics though.
http://www.google.nl/images?q=comicbook+styles http://www.google.nl/images?q=Don+Lawrence+storm
@ ceropecero:
Yeah… I tried to put noises in the image, but thought it was ruining the stunning pictures made by the durian team.
Specially the landing of Scales on the roof could use some falling lines and a ‘Boink’ text. But its cc3 so… :-)
@ Niyado:
At A4 the tekst is better.
But yeah,… for the web it could use better anti-alias and be a little bigger. Also a language choice would be nice.
Any narration would be nice, it’s pretty hard to imagine how much is clear of the story on a first read. That must have been hard on the Durian team as well, specially for Colin.
Not having the bandwidth to download the actual movie, this was great!!!
Looks really nice, but the story is difficult to recover if you haven’t seen the film. It’s not quite clear what’s going on, e.g. in the fight with the unknown warrior scene.
I am sorry, but I do not think this is too well done. The idea is good, and there is nothing wrong with the “silent” style or even with the very thick boxes. But to pull this off you need to get the pacing right and the layout clear. I was often confused as to which panel to read first since the normal(?) left-right top-down reading would not make sense. And I think the passing out in the snow would have worked very well as three panels with shared background to illustrate short passing of time. In general the passing of time seemed a bit off…
That being said, the inherent task for this chosen style is extremely difficult and you do manage at least a proof of concept…i just think it needs polish…
@yoff:
Thanks for your critiq, some very valid points you make.
“I was often confused as to which panel to read first”
That was the idea though. As time is a big actor in the story.
A printed version does force a better line of eye.
“And I think the passing out in the snow would have worked very well as three panels with shared background to illustrate short passing of time.”
I agree, that is a more comic style. I experimented with boxes and fades to see what works.
Using fades to tell the pass of a night and a pass of 10 years apparently gives the same confussion on the sense of time as I had with the movie. At first I wanted to ‘fix’ that, but I kept it in. But yeah, its arguable.
“but I do not think this is too well done.”
Ai. that’s just harsh man. But thanks for comparing it with the daily comics you buy. ;)
@Pawel:
The story of the movie is also difficult to discover I think.
Do you have any ideas on how to improve it? Except the obvious of putting it all on the right time line, and having events equal amount of page space according to time?
Only crit I have is that it is an important foreshadowing when the Shaman says “This blade has shed much innocent blood.” because, as we all know now, it is the blade she uses to kill innocent Scales. I would add that dialog because imho it makes the story that much more epic.
Also I think it is a big reveal when she sees the scar on the dead dragon’s wing, and matches it up to little scales; that is the moment of realization for her. So maybe include that as well to portray why she has such a mystified look on her face after the fight. you can also add annotations to help the reader along…