Darren and Chris's Post

Apologies for the belated post. Our project, as we anticipated, was very time consuming. As I write this, Darren is finishing our 48th page. Our process began several weeks ago with a core plot outline. This outline had all of the major plot points, for which we anticipated two pages per point, so roughly 35 pages total. We worked together on the opening and then split up the rest according to flow and what we felt comfortable with. Even though a lot of our work was done solo, we met quite frequently to exchange images, jokes, and try to deal with tying our various story strands together. We stuck to the story pretty well, and I credit our early plot outline as one of the major successes of the project.

Among the challenges then was trying to adapt our differing styles with a cohesive narrative. We not only had to have our pages appear to have been written by the same author, but we were telling the story of two characters in a variety of situations. We were dealing with reality as a concept, never an easy thing to depict. We were able to find some great shots in google images to allow us to have our fictional character enter the real world and our "real" character in George Lucas enter Davin's fake world. As we explore in the project, such lines blur.

Narrative continuity kind of dove tails with our stylistic differences and collaboration problems. Using "found art" like photos meant we had to use photoshop extensively in order to have the figures fit with our narrative. Photoshopping a single cell could take anywhere from ten minutes to three hours. Trying to prioritize our time was a challenge in that respect. Yet, even when we did our best to get the pictures to do what we wanted, we still had to have the transitions between cells, between pages, and between stories mesh well.

Thus, there were several cells that seemed jumbled or incongruois with the flow, and we had to make it work. While our project is 48 pages, to us that comes with the modifier "only." It could, and deserves to be, much longer. Not only do we feel we could have explored the possibilities of the story more, but we also felt that we could have paced the story better.

All in all, we consider this a successful project. Hell, we had a lot of fun with it and learned something in the process. A lot of that learning had to do with saving your work properly. Oh well.

-Darren, Chris (and Davin)