adaptation

Adaptations of Kafka's Metamorphosis have had varying degrees of success. The beginning of Kafka's text forces us to see events unfold from Gregor Samsa's perspective and evoke a sense of empathy from the reader. Translating the text to a visual narrative creates a very different response from the audience. Something is always lost in translation. A reworking or re- imagining of the original text is required to adapt it to a visual medium.



Robert Crumb's Kafka, 2005

Part illustrated biography, part comic adaptation.





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Caroline Leaf The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, 1977. Animation.








http://www.carolineleaf.com/

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Steven Berkoff's stage adaptation of The Metamorphosis





Filmed version, 1987 (Dir. Jim Goddard)


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...

Opening montage...

The opening montage...

motion and confinement...

setting up clues to character and their instincts and behaviour...

contrast between chaos and order... juxtaposing static scenes with frantic motion... building tension... setting up obstacles

reflections using montage as a mirror, actions are duplicated

internal and external expressions

animal instincts



Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (Dir. Miike Takashi, 2002)


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The Cremator (Dir. Juaraj Herz, 1969)

black and white

The Kiss by Jeffrey Catherine Jones


http://www.jeffreyjones-art.com/



Expressive and loose inking styles can be seen in the comic art of:

Jacques Tardi
Jeffrey Jones
Jorge Zaffino
Tony Salmons
Dave McKean
...



Black and white photography gives a sense of the past and a feel of documentary - an objective feel... removing emotional associations of colour, the viewer is guided toward a particular reading...
I have chosen to produce black and white artwork for my MA project to compliment a subjective visual narrative.


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"Black is the most essential colour ... [it] should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid colour of the palette or of the prism."

-Odilion Redon


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"I didn't have money to buy the paint so I would work a regular day job working on apartments, doing sheet rocking or plastering things and then I would steal all the leftover gallons of paint and add them to other gallons. So (my work) was purely black and white because it was the easiest and cheapest way to pull it off."

- WK Interact

(from an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2009)


the cover to the Jan 2009 issue of Juxtapoz magazine features art by street artist WK Interact

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"For some unknown godforsaken reason, I become an editor at DC Comics. I pitch the idea of a black and white anthology series featuring Batman. The key to the series' success, I figure, is to hire the very best artists in the business. Most everyone at DC tells me it won't sell. No one likes black and white comics. No one likes anthologies... the series becomes a creative and financial success."

- Mark Chiarello

(from the introduction to Batman Black and White, Vol. 1: 2007)

Breaking walls - film and animation

Subjective narratives that use the medium as part of the storytelling...





The Holy Mountain (Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

"What I cannot do in [cinema], I do in comics."

(Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2004)

Heavy Traffic (Dir. Ralph Baksi, 1973)





Poster designed by Jan Lenika for Roman Polanki's Repulsion, 1965


The Tenant (Dir. Roman Polanski, 1976)


"just play yourself"

Irma Vep (Dir.Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Breaking walls - comics

self-reflexive comics...


An awareness of the comics medium becomes part of the narrative...






Japanese manga artist, Shintaro Kago... As Abstraction progresses, the narrative becomes fragmented and the panels are re-ordered giving a dreamlike and disjointed sense of time



> a page from Abstraction by Shintaro Kago (c. 2007)















Grant Morrison's Animal Man... the author interacts with the character...
The character exists outside of the comic book panel...



Animal Man #19 (Cover Art by Brian Bolland, 1990)




Animal Man #26 (Cover art by Brian Bolland, 1990)


(interior page from Animal Man #26. Written by Grant Morrison, art by C. Troug and M. Farmer)

Cronenberg's typewriter

Stills from Naked Lunch (Dir. D. Cronenberg, 1991)






Below:

A Polish film poster for Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, designed by Eugeniusz Skorwider







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A short interview with John Reppion and Leah Moore on writing for comics




John Reppion and Leah Moore are a married comics-writing team. They are based in the UK, and have been writing for American publications.

Do you ever draw layouts on scripts for each other or the artist?

JOHN REPPION:

The ridiculously strict, long winded process that we have is that we sit down and we discuss everything, we sit down and discuss the story, we make notes about what's gonna happen (the beginning, middle and end kind of thing) then we write down the numbers of the pages and then next to each page we write down what happens on each page then Leah draws a rectangle, we divide that rectangle into how many panels we want on the page, how big they are and then Leah draws little sketches...

LEAH MOORE:

...I do little thumbnails of indecipherable nonsense and whenever he has to type from them he's always like, "What's that there? Is it like a man lying on his back screaming?" No, it’s a horse joyously leaping over a hedge - they're really awful aren't they?

JOHN REPPION:

They're not that bad... you get to do them, I'm not allowed to do them because you can't tell what mine are... Because we talk things through as you're drawing them out, we just have them in our mind more than anything. We divide those sketches up and then basically just sit at separate computers and type them up.

LEAH MOORE:

We grab say four pages each and type four pages and then get another four pages until its all done...

JOHN REPPION:

...and when they're typed up, then we go through and add al the dialogue in. I think most people would just say, write what's happening and just start typing...

LEAH MOORE:

Like; "he is climbing up a building"... yeah, it would probably be a lot more conversational.

JOHN REPPION:

Which you could do if you were writing it on your own I suppose but, if you're two people writing it...

LEAH MOORE:

This might be why it takes us so bloody long to get through a script to be honest.

Storyboards

Above: my pre-production storyboard sketches for the infamous NTU 'Violette project' depicting unnatural and uncomfortable interview compositions. The sketches were made after our teams initial brief to create a short documentary film was canceled by the man himself and replaced by a new brief to film a series of short interviews about perceptions of fear and comedy in a controlled studio environment.



below: the video footage was edited by Benz and projected onto a studio wall as part of an exhibition of the collective Violette projects




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Body horror - transformation scene from John Carpenter's The Thing:




The Thing (Dir. J.Carpenter, 1982)

Storyboards by Mentor Huebner





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storyboard layout for Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso

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In terms of speed, it is much faster to draw storyboards directly into Photoshop, especially when an animatic is to be produced using the storyboard art, but after recently experiencing computer malfunctions, with my laptop attempting to self destruct, I am looking to a more traditional way of producing storyboards. A beat script will be illustrated using the Japanese storyboard layout seen above and I will be sketching quickly on paper using soft lead pencils. The art can later be scanned and manipulated further. Having a hard copy of the original pencil art, it will be easy to display the work without having to rely on technology. The storyboards will be used as a reference for further experiments with poster design, comic book art and animation.