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Story Start (nsfw!)

Flames | Chapter Start

Flames | Page 105

Flames | Page 107

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No Text Version Here!

Rejected Shots Here!

"And why are you naked anyways? Mostly naked."

"Fresh out of the tubes and of course the suit printer jammed."

So this page kinda didn't develop the way I hoped. It was always a bit of an awkward one because I didn't like the way the layout and pacing would work if it had been combined with this and the next or one or the prior one, in some fashion. I had hoped to flesh it out a bit more. While I did get to include the line of Rederick asking Dr. Gravitas to speak out of only one mouth, the reference to why he's naked never really fit anywhere without derailing the flow too far. Maybe if I had gone with the an earlier idea (between the time I made the original plan and started on the sequence) to include Rederick's elevator ride up here, I would have had more material out of the last page to merge into this one. But, that idea had its own problems. I wanted Gravitas' intro-summary to be a "surprise" sort of moment, and it felt unnatural to have a skip between the elevator and the summary so we didn't cover it twice. I suppose it might have worked as a reaffirmation of, say, a text message or some such but it still would have been weird to have Rederick just go in there and move right to the case, instead of (presumably) having milled over there in the midst of saying what he wanted to say. Moreover, the elevator would have required some extra work as he would be rising through the work sector instead of the residential one. That, I didn't exactly have a lot of time for and the elevator would have presented very little additional info beyond visually detailing another area. It could have had a moment flashing to Blythe (but I plan to save that for some other time) or a flash-back to expand something from when Rederick and Yeltsin met in the latter's apartment. That last idea, though I thoroughly enjoy it on a personal level, was absolutely incompatible with the story and undermined numerous things. At any rate, the elevator idea had departed the moment I posted the prior page, and I ultimately didn't find a more meaningful addition for this page's dialog.

In terms of a skills challenge, however, this page gave me a bit more than I bargained for. There's a considerable number of poses in play here, even with the near-duplicates. Quite a number of sculpts were required, as well, but some of them turned out to be the best I've devised yet, in my opinion. True, there are limitations imposed by the topology and the workflow of bringing them back into Maya, but for what they are, I feel a lot of them turned out well. Nevertheless, they were very time consuming and these holiday-months are already a very tight schedule. I really do hope to get this thing done before I'm 40. Which makes my decision to split the planned 2 Supersize Squares for the bottom row into 4 regular squares and two wides all the stranger. Originally, I planned for standard size page that ended on the "I know" line but even going into the sequence I knew I wanted to tweak things, make a a wide page, and bring in some extra dialog. The revised wide plan had a Super Square overhead shot of the 6 bodies speaking back and forth to Rederick before he gets fed up with the voices and asks for just one. The 2nd super-square shot was to be basically the same shot with the "Very Well" response. But that was obviously unsatisfactory and I wanted at least a different shot, maybe of the whole room or something. As I got into the page (and began struggling with difficult lighting conditions) I hit upon the idea of splitting the super square to again show Gravitas speaking out of more than body, but in a way that establish a sort of range of behavior (similar to what I tried to do with his appearance with Blythe on page 51/52). Whereas the last page's interaction established his ability to vary his coordinated performance and express the depth of his thoughts through body language, here he was to demonstrate unity and coordination at the other end of the range. The idea I had was to make an expression with his ears "ripple" through his lines like a wave. I mixed in some tail flick variety without a pattern too, but on the whole the effect proved much to mild to really be visually interesting, I think. Each head, eyes, and ears are also slightly tweaked to stare directly at Rederick. At 24 individual poses (plus 4 more for Rederick) the split added a lot of minor, but time-consuming, additional static characters that I probably could have done without. I even went so far as to develop a (rather ad-hoc and sub-standard) variation on my blend-injection script that I could take in all the filenames I needed and automatically produce the static characters. This was a significant time-saver as the dialog boxes I skipped add several seconds on to each use (3 in a single character static building). Nevertheless, just the blend injections alone took over an hour to build out.

The last bit of disappointment would have to be with panels 2 and 3 and overall pacing. The intent had been to be facing Rederick and Gravitas (specifically the body of him that's beside Rederick). The statue present now only in the penultimate panel was to be prominently hanging behind them and in the background, you were to see Gravitas move to the door to hold it open for himself as he entered with labcoats. This proved too busy with text and to suffer from both "front-face" on Rederick and eye-focus problems on Gravitas, while still obscuring the his two bodies in the background. While I think the solution present in the final page is better, you lose the context of Gravitas appearing in the back with coats (the body on the far left foreground in panel one is looking to the door as he begins to move to open it). You lose the body of Gravitas moving away from Rederick to position in line (granted, I wasn't happy with the pace of its movement anyways). Finally, you completely miss the entry of the body carrying the coats and the lovely sculpt work I did on the body opening it (difficult as it was to see anyways.) Finally, I find myself unsatisfied with Dr. Gravitas in the last panel. I struggled with a camera angle that didn't appear isolated from the space while still giving a nod to the way Dr. Gravitas appears in the rest of comic with his face initially obscured.

On the other hand, my fursona's genitals in these sculpts have been described as "satisfying to look at" so it's not all bad :Y