Reflecting on July – September 2021

Welcome to a quarterly flashback where we look back at what happened over the last 3 months in the process of making DUALITY comic!

Production started for V1C8

We finally entered the production phase for chapter 8!

This chapter is at least 2-3X more difficult to make compared to previous chapters

  • More characters
  • Complex battle scenes
  • Updating 3D production workflow to compose more complex scenes and explosions

Here’s an example demonstrating the production process:

Script – 2 passes on storyboards – character flatting& shading + compositing

Latest version scripts

Once upon a time, a professional TV producer told me that script is about 20% of the final product. And storyboards is 50%. Production is the other 30%.

After working on DUALITY for the past 7 chapters, I finally understand what it means: It’s not about the writing itself that matter, it’s more so that it’s “easy to understand and helps others on the team to work towards the same vision” that really shows in the end.

Page D

  1. Someone countered GongGong’s full-scale water magic attack with powerful fire attack
  2. Water evaporates into steam
  3. Among the thick floating steam, comes a man fully covered in red armor Each of his hands holding a metal ring burning in flame Text: ZhuRong – the Fire Master.
  4. GongGong’s reaction – shock (Flashback) Fear of his father’s ability
  5. GongGong: At last.. very well.
  6. Snake king: Let’s end this quickly. He transforms into his true form – the frightening 9 headed monster
  7. GongGong hops on top of the middle head among the 9 snake heads
  8. GongGong whispering to his blade in an ancient language
  9. His hand holds the handle of the Yin blade Before drawing it out, the blade glows in a hue of blue that only purest ice can match
  10. Dark clouds start gathering above, thunder and lightning follows
  11. Jing witnesses this very moment, her expression is unnaturally frightened, she murmurs: No doubt, this is the legendary Yin Blade.

Block out the rough layout (with chicken scratch line art)

Each panel goes through 2-3 times redraw. Surprisingly, this is the most time consuming part of the process because the possibilities are infinite and you need to choose the best possible option that goes well with the rest of the page. Sometime it requires revising the written script because there’s just too much happening and can’t all fit in the same page.

Storyboards cleanup

John did his magic in this pass

  • Improved composition and page flow
  • Updated character posing

He made 2 versions of this panel just to see which version works better

  • One with the 9 headed snake rushing toward the camera
  • The other with a high camera shot featuring the transformation + a phantom facial expression of the snake king coming towards the camera

Rough line art cleanup pass

Focused on correcting composition, put characters on model, update character posing and 1st pass on establishing shots

Coloring and shading pass

Darren did his magic

I realized how important it is to give directions on character lighting in the design brief

Check out Darren’s personal work here:

https://www.instagram.com/mr.anderson.x/

Character designs for V1C8 – Crowd variations

John helped me with color variations for these designs

Check out John’s personal work here:

https://www.instagram.com/morecado/

Half-snake soldiers

Animal tribe warriors

Next quarter is the last quarter of 2021, I’m looking forward to what happens next in the creation process of volume 1 chapter 8 ^^


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