Sunday, September 23, 2007

How do we make a Hatman comic?

My friend, and fellow 3Twin, Steve, suggested that I explain what all goes into a Hatman comic from conception to flash file. First one of us (Andy, Steve or myself) has an idea and we discuss it over the phone or through email. Then one of us writes a script (usually the one who had the original idea) and the other two read over the script and edit it for spelling and grammar (Andy is usually the worst a spelling and I am usually the worst at grammar) Then usually the original writer rewrites the script or one of the other 2 will do the rewrites. On occasion we have sat together and done rewrites. We did this with Heroic & Incredible which turned out to be one of our best adventures yet. After the writing process is finished we decide the order the scripts should come out in. Sometimes it doesn't matter when a script could come out, other times it is very important that a certain script come before or directly after another one because a new character may be introduced or something crucial to the plot may need to happen in a certain order. Once we figure out the order we assign the script to an artist (most of the time Steve, but sometimes others). Regardless of who is drawing for that issue, Steve will go through the script and figure out where the page breaks should be and then he creates a layout for the cells with comic life on his wife's Mac book. He then will print out the cells for himself or the other artist to draw in. Sometimes he will do a quick sketch of what he would like in the cell other times he just hands the blank cells on to the artist for them to do it their self. Then the artist draws in the cells in pencil and later goes over it in pen. After that we scan the drawings into the computer and I take over the coloring process. I usually just use MS Paint to fill in the shapes but sometimes we need something a little more special and then I take the colored picture into Photoshop and I will add any elements to it there (for example the different colored beams of light in the disco scene after color is restored to Hatman in Its Not Such A Wonderful Life). During the drawing phase I gather the audio. I have the various voice actors come to my house and record their lines directly into my computer using my Creative sound card. Each character is recorded separately because some of us do more than one character and certain characters may need to have some special effect done to the voice (i.e. I do the voice of the Leprechaun and we pitch it up slightly so he will sound smaller). After we have all the audio recorded either Andy or I will edit the audio with SONY Vegas Video editing software. We save the files as large wav files. Then I cut them up into the individual pages (adding the page turn notification chime) and I reduce them to a smaller mp3 file I play around with each ones compression so that it will be the smallest file yet still sound nearly as good as its wav counterpart. Then we take the colored pages and the compressed audio into SwishMax and put the comic together with the page flip animation and add any other animations that may be needed. Finally we upload it to the web and I send out an email to those who are signed up for our newsletter informing them that we have a new Hatman comic.

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