digi comic

[pctoolml]

this is the beginnings of a 6 page narrative. trying to get a good solid and clean story telling skeleton going b4 rendering any furthur. can you guys tell whats going on? what can i do to improve the narrative?

[Star Eater]

Hmmm let's see

The girl is watching the two guys through her binocs, from up above. One guy grabs the other and then a gun is shown? Being pulled by the bald guy? View switches back to girl.

Bald guy looks smug, then drops his gun. Clutches his arm, view shows girl again then the expression on the two guys.

Is that right? It took me more than one look, but I think if it was the actual finished work I would have seen the story straight away.

I would suggest not changing the camera for the shot of the hand dropping the gun. Rather keep that view point the same as the previous frame but with a closeup of the hand and gun like you have already. Because at first, to me, it looked like two guns were drawn because you have two guys facing each other in a stand of. That's just my opinion though.

[pctoolml]

thanks for the crit,

yea thats pretty much the story, i guess with some dialog it'll be clearer that girl is a telepathic, and she made the guys hand muscles cramp up, (thats why he dropped the gun)

[wooblood]

Honestly, after studying the frames, I don't think the action/story is very clear at all, despite the simple frame sequencing.
PAGE 1
- I think the binocs could be more apparent in the first frame
- In the binoc view, we see a bunch of people standing there (so far all looking the same) and then in the next frame we see two people addressing each other (btw, not sure if the one on the left is male or female at this point), but which two people is it (two from the binoc view or two from where the viewer is standing?)
- Who is drawing that gun in the corner frame?
- The girl's expression (apparent intention) in the right corner frame looks very vague at this point
PAGE 2
- The gun flying out is very confusing. Is it dropping straight down, or is it actually flying sideways? And why?
- We know now that binocular girl is above at some distance, but that middle frame seems to just cut her into the action. Confusing.
- Not sure what's happening in the very last frame.

I'm not an expert on comic book storytelling or anything, so these are just my own logical opinions as a reader. When it comes to clear storytelling, I think you need to think about camera angles as actual viewpoint perspectives, keeping in mind cinematic movement (as if we're seeing still frames from a motion picture) and limiting the viewpoints so the viewer doesn't get confused at what they're seeing. For instance, whenever we see binocular girl, how about if it's always an upwards looking angle since she's high up above (you could throw in an extreme bird's eye view so we see her and the people below her if it's appropriate). We're missing a lot of the spatial relationships between the people in the action because almost all of the frames are closeup shots (unless it's supposed to be a hectic quick-shot type of scene).
Lastly, the simple framing you're using is good for clear sequencing, but I feel that it's missing some dynamism/entertainment factor, so I would try sprucing that up a bit.

[wooblood]

Whoops, wrong button.