Revised Animation Fun and Behind the Scenes

Starting to have a little fun with this animation for advertising! All our art starts on pencil and paper. I completed the inking, coloring, lettering, and special FX of AoM& A #1 on our computers. I mentioned using AI on the previous post to animate the image I created of Manuel. AI did not exist in our earlier web projects and comic publishing ventures. I’m not sure I would want to generate the comic stories fully with AI. I think sticking to the more traditional methods, albeit, a digitized hybrid, would be more satisfying all the way around. But using AI to animate or add special effects, I think would be okay.

 

Concerning the writing: That too started on paper and pencil with the original ’90’s concept written more like a novel. Later, I did pencil thumbnails breakdowns on just plain ol’ copy paper folded into a comic book like format and I abbreviated the script in word balloons and dialog boxes on the pages. From that I typed out a more detailed script in my computer and sent that to my long time friend, writer, and in this case assistant editor. (Shout out to my buddy Leonardo Ramirez! ) Lenny read it over, made grammar and spelling corrections and suggested better wording and points of view. I took his suggestions to heart and made proper revisions. We went back and forth until we had a more polished script which I could use in the lettering process.

The finished digital artwork for the cover and pages was going on in the meanwhile. Most of the finished art was done in an app called Graphic, for lack of a better name apparently, ( It was first called iDraw.) with the scanned pencil sketches underlying all of it. (From the developers over at Picta, Inc.) After the art was complete I brought all of it into Affinity Publisher to assemble and letter all the pages. Files were saved as PDFs throughout the process and to send to the various printers. So there has been a lot of digital tools used in all of this.

Artificial Intelligence is just the latest computer tools we have had at our discretion.  AI is a bit scary in some ways, but if used for good intentions I don’t see anything wrong with using it to assist in the creation process. It’s a tool just like Graphic and Affinity Publisher. I don’t know about using it as the primary creator which some are doing. It’s something to think about and a discussion we need to have. What do you think. Drop me a line using our email from the printed book or PDF if you bought the Kindle edition.

Have a great day! – Mark