sister midnight

Open publication - Free publishing - More noir

www.valentepencil.com

(photo of MA expo open day by Charlotte)

Jeff Jones

the protagonist and the audience

Above: In the opening sequence of David Lynch's Lost Highway, before we see the protagonist, we see his reflection, we see his perception of events.


...

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption

Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption
Edited by Paul Gravett, John Dunning and Emma Pettit


"A selection of pieces from Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption will be exhibited at the The Jam Factory in Oxford, alongside the winners of the November ’09 Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption comic strip competition.

In September ’09, Ctrl.Alt.Shift ran a competition asking people to create comic strips on the theme of corruption. The winner’s work was exhibited in the Lazarides Gallery in London in November ’09 alongside a retrospective look at how comics and satire have been used throughout history to highlight political important issues."




http://www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk/event/ctrlaltshift-unmasks-corruption-comic-exhibition




photo: Olivia Flint

technology

above: layout and digital lettering with Adobe InDesign on an Imac.



It is nice to finally be able to use a functional computer... The artwork was completed using traditional art tools and then scanned at 600dpi and cleaned up in Photoshop. The final artwork is prepared for print with the final layout adjustments and text completed digitally using InDesign. I have also experimented with the sequence of the pages using small thumbnails and importing the scanned artwork into non-linear video editing software. Lettering the comic digitally has allowed for the text to be edited and altered with non destructive edits to complement the artwork. For the lettering, I have been using comic fonts designed by Blambot as my focus is on illustration rather than typography, using pre-existing fonts allows me to focus on the sequential design of the artwork.







http://www.balloontales.com/tips/tails_joins/index.html

Digital comic lettering tests with Manga Studio

work in progress

ink on paper

writing with pictures

perception versus reality

a scene from 'Stranger on the Third Floor', Dir. Boris Ingster (1940)

























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the exhibition that never was?








Alejandro Jodorowsky's 'Dune': An Exhibition of a Film of a Book that never was Curated by Tom Morton 2 April - 16 May


Plymouth Arts centre


Based on the top result from a Google search, cult film director and author, Alejandro Jodorowsky was deemed enough of a draw for curator, Tom Morton to use his name on posters and host an exhibition in the Plymouth Arts Centre that promised more than it delivered. His Google search research uncovered an English translation of an interview with Jodorowsky from a c.1977 issue of Métal Hurlant (#107). The French publication was found, dissected, placed on a table, covered with glass and displayed as the centre piece of the exhibition.

The ripped up magazine and a book on Jean Giraud/Moebius's art borrowed from the local library were the only trace of Moebius's pre-production artwork. Prints of concept art by Christopher Foss and H.R. Giger faced the table displays. There was little else of interest to anyone visiting the gallery that had already done a quick search on the internet for information. What the exhibition did feature prominently were the recent illustrations and sculptures of the curators friends, loosely linked to Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, by their titles or having randomly selected lines from the book scrawled onto illustrations. All you need is a magazine, a Google search for a famous name and a pair of scissors and you have an exhibition - and don't forget to bring your friends along for the ride.





Jodorowsky and Moebius created thousands of pre-production storyboard sketches and designs for their intended film adaptation of Dune before the project was taken away from them. Jodorowsky relocated to Paris and changed to the medium of comic books and effectively continued to make films on paper, moving away from film studio interference. His concepts for Dune are present in the Metabaron's series of bande dessinée and he has used the comic book medium to juxtapose text and image in a challenging and visceral way that he was not permitted to explore further through the medium of film. Jodorowsky was not interested in a straight adaptation but in experimentation, revealling in the magazine interview, "I did not want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes, nor Edipo with Esquilo." During his talk, on 6th May, the curator, Morton sidestepped a question from the audience about Jodorowsky's input saying simply, "We talked".







The crumbling Plymouth art centre had a lot of character, the floor creaks and the paint peels and it played host to an exhibition that could have been great. From the presentation talk given by the curator, Tom Morton it was revealed that his main inspiration for the show was a google search and finding out that Alejandro Jodorowsky does not own the rights to the Dune project.

Jodorowsky's anecdotes of his struggle with the material, and his first impressions of Pink Floyd, were regurgitated by the curator to an audience. His google search led to a translation of a Métal Hurlant magazine article that documented Jodorowsky's struggle to get his version of the film made, the magazine itself was prominantly displayed on two tables under glass. This was the extent of the promised pre production imagery by Moebius from Jodorowsky's work on Dune. The walls had prints of Giger and Foss. The original work on show, modern responses to Dune, were revealed at the talk by Morton to be illustrations made with a distaste for the original text and depicting lines chosen at random from Herbert's novel. Having seen a video interview with Jodorowsky in his own library, flipping through a hardbacked book that contained Moebius's pre-production storyboards and costume designs, I expected at least a glimpse of the existing artwork. It was a long way to travel for a torn up magazine and some prints.

Having dismissed Jodorowsky's 'cult status' and Herbert's writing as being not to his liking, the curator himself seemed unsure of the audience he was aiming for. Those in attendance at his talk seemed to have wandered in to a private party. Using Jodorowsky's name to display a few prints and throw together a few illustrations was a very conceptual, modern take on the adaptation which is exactly what Morton wanted, but exactly the opposite of what the audience wanted to see.

Allegedly 5 books exist that hold the storyboards and conceptual illustrations for Jodorowsky's treatment of Dune and none were present at the exhibition. The comic art that realized concepts originally intended for Dune also exist somewhere... just not here. The exhibition was a missed opportunity.


Here is the top listed item in a Google search for Jodorowsky's Dune; http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky.asp

The website goes into detail on Jodorowsky's vision for Dune, translating the Métal Hurlant article and further information on the Dune project can be easily be found online and in the 2006 book by Ben Cobb, 'Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky'.


What the exhibition did show was the importance of research in the creation of a project. Used effectively, research can make the outcome a lot more successful.

analogue art

"Currently, I’m back to painting or drawing most all the artwork, and scanning in any and all pieces and working on them on my computer before sending off the final version on disk. Original art may be one piece of artwork or a composite of twenty separate elements. So I suppose the fact that the work is done by hand helps
it look more 'human'.”*

-Bill Sienkiewicz

* The Education of a Comics Artist: Visual Narrative in Cartoons, Graphic Novels,
and Beyond, edited by Michael Dooley and Steven Heller(2005) New York: Allworth Press

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Traditional art tools: drawing board, pencils, white acrylic paint, brushes and a dip pen with Gillot 303 nibs and a lot of Indian ink. I currently have a drawing board in the hall and another in the living room with 2 pages set up on each board... I pace around a lot and then find myself in front of a new board and continue sketching like I'm stuck in an old ping pong arcade game. I also acquired some toy cars and a door viewer to use for distorted macro photo reference.



Influenced by Moebius's experimental 'comic without a script', The Airtight Garage that continued to be published in Metal Hurlant magazine from 1976–1980 and the well received recent stream-of-consciousness comic art by Geof Darrow for Shaolin Cowboy, I am progressing with the narrative of my own comic using a combination of text and image, essentially completing the script with images rather than words. This method seems to be working for me as images suggest where there narrative should lead and with the visual medium of comics, the art needs to clearly show the story using a sequential illustrations and be understood without needing text. Stan Lee used the conceptual talents of the artists he worked with to his advantage, allowing them freedom to create a sequence, providing them with only a skeletal plot outline. After the artwork was completed, he would then complete the writing process, and as a result of his prolific output, 'the Marvel Method' has been a tried and tested method for the creation of comic books.

Below: left, a page from Moebius' The Airtight Garage c. 1976 and right, a page from Shaolin Cowboy with line art by Geof Darrow and coloured by Peter Doherty.

After collecting visual references, writing a treatment and an early draft of a script I have been experimenting with beat scripts with mixed results. I am continuing the project by letting the narrative unfold using visual beats; storyboarding the comic book and writing with images. The juxtaposition of images in the pencilling stage suggests where the sequence should go. The dialogue will be added digitally after the final artwork has been scanned. The comic pages are loosely laid out in pencil, setting out the composition and erased when necessary and then the bulk of the drawing is done in ink.

below: work in progress, using ink as part of the development of the drawing




Using traditional art tools, I can get a more immediate and violent effect in the artwork that reflects the violence in the narrative. The sharp Gillot 303 nibs used in the dip pens scratch away at the paper and occasional ink splatter adds to the disorder that I want to create in the depiction of the protagonists world in the comic. Reworked artwork, using white acrylic to paint over lines and then inking over those marks is there to suggest that the protagonists perception may not be reliable. As seen in a previous post, using the example of the art style of Jerry Moriarty, leaving traces of the artwork below layers of ink and paint draws attention to the medium itself and leaves evidence of the artist in the construction of the images.

Jerry Moriarity's reworked comic art illustration style can be seen in my previous blog post: http://valentedrawingboard.blogspot.com/2010/02/human-hand.html

"I often sketch with pen. It forces me to be exact. And if it doesn't work, it screams at me. The sketch. The pen just laughs."

-Bill Sienkiewicz

below: a page from Bill Sienkiewicz's Marvel comic book adaptation of David Lynch's film of Dune

in dreams

Little Nemo in Slumberland (Winsor McCay, 1908)





'Cat Bus' from My Neighbour Totoro (Dir. Hayao Miyazki, 1988)




The Temptation of St. Anthony by Salvador Dalí (Oil on canvas,1946)


Above: visual representations of a distorted perception of reality.

fact and fiction bleed together

"The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain."

— Roberto Bolaño

2666

In Roberto Bolaño's 2666 the authors research is clearly seen in his practice as the chapter entitled 'The Part About The Crimes' documents a series of femicides that occurred in Ciudad Juarez with a journalistic detachment that makes the reading of the chapter more unsettling. In the novel, the crimes are set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa. The author gives a context to each of the murders to humanize the victims and explore the ongoing corruption that allows the murder of women to continue without being cluttered by the media's focus on Ciudad Juarez as a battleground in Mexico's drug war. These are human casualties.

comic book horror noir

Jacques Tardi

comic book noir










Jacques Tardi allows dreams and reality to fragment and synthesize in his work, to highlight the mental and physical trauma that is produced by acts of violence. His protagonists have difficulty in separating fact from fiction and the reader cannot anticipate the outcome as the fragmented narrative unfolds, becoming more involved with the work.

strewn newspapers

newspapers, reflections and locked doors...







Francis Bacon, Study of George Dyer, 1969 (oil on canvas)


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Francis Bacon, In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 (oil on canvas)

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Francis Bacon, A Piece of Wasteland, 1982 (oil on canvas)


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visual references...



film language transferred to an alternative medium...




Still from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Poemkin, 1925

Bacon frequently referenced images from film and photography to construct narratives...


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"I had a furious row with a studio executive once: he said, "They won't get it, Nic" and I said, "No, they'll get it; it's you who's not getting it, because you're trying to force something that's different into being the same". People usually arrive to see something with an open mind. I want to make them feel something emotionally, but not by planning how to get them there. That would almost be like the communist days when newspapers told people what to think - when there was no competition with Pravda."

-Nicolas Roeg


http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/jun/03/hayfilmfestival2005.hayfestival

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cut-ups...

fragments of information...

torn newspapers.... partial headlines...

interpretation...

perception...

Rius

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"Rius's comics were not for escapist entertainment but were intended as cultural guerilla warfare, attempting to shame the middle-class Mexican into an awareness of his society and its glaring inequalities and hypocrises."
(Raat: 39)










Ed. Raat, W.D. and Beezley, W.H. (2007) Twentieth Century Mexico, USA: University of Nebraska Press


http://lambiek.net/artists/r/rius.htm

Aztec mythology and Mexican 'comics'

above: A page from the Codex Borgia showing Aztec gods of life and death - image taken from The skeleton at the feast: the Day of the Dead in Mexico (by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer) .

















Picture manuscript...

Discovered c.1519 in Mexico



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McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisisble Art, New York: Harper Collins

visual narrative

film > comic
storyboards > layout & pagination
screen > print > computer screen

interactive medium > active audience

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mise en scene > mise en page

"Where the filmic image enters into a spatial relationship only with the off-screen space cut off by the frame, the bande dessinée image will always be perceived simultaneously with other images. Each panel is, then, surrounded by its perifield." (Peters 1991:15)

Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French Language Comic Strip, UK: Intellect Books

Kafkaesque on Prezi

Kafkaesque

Kafkaesque:

adj.

1. Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.

2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence" (New Yorker).

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Kafkaesque

Towards a thematic adaptation... recontextualizing themes and atmosphere from Kafka's text for a modern audience... themes in Kafka's text fit the aesthetics of film noir, sharing similar traits. The paranoid 'wronged' protagonist, isolation, crime, entrapment, the femme fatale, a subjective point of view.... Psychological metamorphosis



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"You show the protagonist so that the audience can put themselves under the skin of the man. First of all, I use my camera in such a way as to show things, whenever possible, from the viewpoint of the protagonist: in that way the audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him."

- Fritz Lang

Bogdanovich, P. (1967) Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista

a metamorphosis in response to the text

The problem that arises from a visual adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis is the lack of empathy that would result from not having a human face to identify with; the audience would immediately be emotionally detached from the transformed protagonist. Seeing the protagonist as an insect, with few human traits to hold on to would quickly become uninteresting as the audience would not be able to relate to a subhuman creature. Previous adaptations have attempted to get around this by giving Samsa a human head with an insect body or as seen in the stage version, he is a man with insect movements, but the existing adaptations detract from the sense of empathy with the character that is required from the reader to make the story work and Kafka's text is distorted. Moving away from a mechanical adaptation towards a thematic treatment of Kafka's text allows for a more successful presentation of the key themes in a visual narrative. A human face is necessary for the audience to engage with the protagonist and a step toward a mental metamorphosis, presenting a protagonist with an altered perception opens the work up to becoming a more successful visual narrative.

[Searching for the sure-fire flop]
Max Bialystock: "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Nah, it's too good.
The Producers (Dir. Mel Brooks, 1968)

An example of a successful thematic adaptation is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which deviated from the source material (Philip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep') in order to produce a successful visual narrative. Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealised vision for his film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune started with the director taking ownership over the source material and adding and subtracting concepts without any reverence or obligation to the source material commenting that, "I did not want top respect the novel. I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes... the work of art is created from the collective unconsciousness."1.

While the project was taken away from Jodorowsky after 2 years of pre-production and eventually realised and later disowned by David Lynch in his own adaptation, Jodorowsky was able to develop concepts from thousands of pre- production illustrations for his version of the film and find a new audience for the material using the medium of comic books. He continues to collaborate with artist Jean Giraud. Comic art is a valid medium for communicating a visual language and Jodorowsky found a receptive audience to his work in Europe.

"One of (David) Lynch's unproduced projects is an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis."2. David Lynch has so far been reluctant to produce a film as a mechanical adaptation of the text, revealing in an interview with Chris Rodley, "I've got the script of that. It needs a little bit of work but I like it a lot. Unfortunately it's expensive and it won't make a lot of money." 3.

His existing films do frequently feature metamorphosis and can be seen as being Kafkaesque. Of these existing works, Lost Highway has been very influential on my own research in it's use of a subjective narrative and the use of an unreliable narrator. Lynch uses the aesthetics of film noir to present a visual narrative that can be understood by a modern audience literate in the visual language of film. Fred Madison, the protagonist of Lost Highway constructs a fantasy to escape from his prison cell, revealing that he likes to "remember things my own way". His metamorphosis in the film occurs in his prison cell when he transforms into another very different character, becoming younger, more confident and successful with women. The aesthetic of film noir is important as it complements the subject matter; the shadows that envelop Fred hint at his inner darkness and the femme fatale that he desires leads to his destruction as he loses his grip on the fantasy world that he has contstructed.

As part of my research project, my own exercise in creating a beat script and treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis resulted in the need for an extensive reworking of the original text to make it work visually and the addition of new scenes that distorted the original story to the extent that it made me uncomfortable to produce a straight adaptation that could satisfy myself or an audience familiar with the work. My response to the text and failed attempts at writing a successful adaptation did inspire me to write an alternative, Kafkaesque and subjective narrative that is directed at a modern audience. I have written the first draft and I am developing the short story visually, experimenting with conceptual storyboards to make it work as a visual narrative. The treatment is inspired themes contained in Kafka's work and by a story that continues year after year in the newspapers which can find its audience in the presentation of real human horror in a way that can evoke empathy and create a successful visual narrative.


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1.
Cobb, B. (2007) Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Creation Books


2.
Sheen, E. and Davison A. (2004) The Cinema of David Lynch: American dreams, nightmare visions. Great Britain: Wallflower Press

3.
Ed. Rodley C. and Lynch D. (1997) Lynch on Lynch, England: Faber and Faber Limited

foam

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For the way finding project in Amsterdam, I teamed up with Benz and we started off by getting lost until the Foam gallery found us and we found our bearings. As a starting point, the bicycles and trams that attempted to run us over while we stared at our maps and the welcoming and fractured font of the Foam logo became the trigger for visual experiments depicting our section of the city...

Storyboards for a short animation were fueled by coffee and drawn in cafe's. We made quick test animations by layering pages of the storyboards and making them transparent by using candlelight in a dark cafe'. Motion was a very important aspect of the city; everywhere bicycles zoomed past and as we were on foot we were very aware of the constant flow of people on foot and on two or four wheels. In the storyboard designs, the sliced 'a' of the foam logo is featured in the typography that represented each of the street names of our slice of the city; Vijzelstraat, Kerkstraat, Keizersgracht, Reguliersbreestraat and Rembrandtplein. The curve of the red 'a' detaches from the rest of the letters, slides across the screen and parks in the bottom left corner. The letters stack up in the bottom left corner, the next 'a' in the sequence moves behind the first like the parked bicycles seen in the photo above.



The group meeting to discuss our initial ideas was productive as the feedback that we got in response to our rough designs focused on the sounds of the city; the trams, the clicking traffic lights and the bicycle bells that were another quirk of Amsterdam that needed to be included. A small digital camera was used to record the sounds of the city, more storyboards were sketched out and work started on the digital art needed for the animation. Font was altered using Adobe Illustrator and imported into After Effects to be further manipulated. The sliding 'a' letters were placed onto a new layer to become animated wheels.

The animation developed as Benz reacted to the soundtrack and began to improvise, moving away from the storyboards to produce an animation that complimented the sounds of the busy city streets. The animation was done quickly and instinctively and captured the chaos of the city, becoming more textured and chaotic in response to the soundtrack. Collaborating with Benz was a valuable experience as we complimented one another; he responded to sounds of the city and edited to match the rhythm of the soundtrack and I responded to visuals; incorporating the curves of bicycles wheels and street signs and the horizontal lines of the architecture into the storyboard design. The short deadline allowed us to produce a simple animation that was instinctive and reflected our response to the city.

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Digital animation by Benz:




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Benz's blog: http://suttana.wordpress.com/

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Below is my own experiment in quickly producing a digital animation as a response to the Amsterdam way finding project animation. This animation also deviates from my initial storyboards as I responded to the flexibility of the digital medium, allowing the animation to develop naturally. Created using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.

Lambiek, Amsterdam

On the book shelves at Lambiek, "Europe's first comics shop, and the finest of Holland", comics and graphic novels are organized not by the writers name, but by the name of the artist. The downstairs gallery holds original and limited edition prints of comic art.






http://lambiek.net/about.htm

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