Anthony Appleyard opened this issue on Mar 09, 2017 ยท 14 posts
3D-Mobster posted Tue, 14 March 2017 at 1:26 PM
These are just some quick observations and personal opinions, that you might find useful. I like telling stories through comics as well, but im in no way a professional comic creator or anything. So its only based on my own experience of looking at what these people do and what at least to me seems to work best.
But I have to agree with what some of the others have already mentioned, I think your comic would be more interesting and readable if you constructed each page as a traditional comic, both because its easier to follow the story, but also its what you expect.
If you look at the image MrSparky linked and imagined that each of the images in it were a page of it self, it would be quite difficult to figure out what exactly is going on as you loose the flow, I don't think the flow in the image he linked is optimal either, but its easy to figure out that the small images relate to the big image and what is going on in the scene.
Since you render huge images, I would be very careful how you frame things and keep focus on what is important for the viewer to know and what is not, otherwise you risk that your images looks empty. This is an image for a product im working on, so its not meant to be a comic image or anything, but I think its illustrate my point. The scene is actual very simple and obviously serves the purpose of being a promotional image. But I constructed the scene so its interesting around where the action is and therefore care very little about what is outside its view. Besides the grass, the most complex thing in the scene, ignoring the characters and their clothing, is the wheel that is half outside the image. Rest is pretty much just boxes and planes. But if you add a lot of clutter and whatever you have you can break up the image and even if its simple you can make it more interesting. So at least in my experience you don't have to add a lot of complex things to a huge scene, you just have to make sure that the shot you are trying to make looks good.
Another thing I would recommend is not shooting to many shots with full figures in, first of all it can save you time, but also full figure shots are rarely very interesting, unless the pose is actually telling something that is important for the viewer to know. For instant a person walking down the street talking with someone, it could be a good idea to for instant make a shot where you see them walk and talk, but after that the viewer already know they are walking, so making some interesting close up shots of them having a conversation would be better, i think.
Since you in a lot of your images use the same pose and just change the dialog, it becomes a bit boring because you as viewer expect someone to change pose from one image to the next, so you could save some time, if you use the camera to frame the figures differently because you can get away with simple changes, for instant not spending time posing the legs of a character if they are not going to be in the shot anyway will save you time and make the storytelling better with very little extra work.
The last thing, I miss in your story is the lack of shadows as its pretty confusing for the depth perception, because you expect a character standing on the ground to cast a shadow, but when they don't, they appear flat or as if they are hoovering over the ground or something. In some cases you can get away with it, but I personally find it to only work if its a comic with a minimalistic style or only outlines.
So if I were you I would try to check out how professional comic creators design their pages to tell their stories and how they use the camera and light etc. to create moods, suspense and so on. At least i think i have learned a lot from looking at, how they do it.
But as the rest, I think you put in a lot of effort creating the webpage, images, story and so forth, so hopefully you can use the feedback to something.