Reflections on the Process: Roots Chapter 2

Chapter Reflection: Ch 2: Heir of a Fallen Clan

Impressions

The process of making Emil's first chapter went much smoother than Jwa Fyair's did.

One reason for this, which should not be underestimated, is that this chapter is technically a remake of the second demo chapter. I'd already thought it through, and executed it, and I was even able to re-use a few illustrations.

However, I think that my process improvements between the previous chapter and the latest made an even bigger difference than that.

With this chapter, I all but abandoned the "completion first" experiment, in favour of making the first draft something I could be proud of.

I was still left, when that draft was done, with the nagging feeling that the work wasn't good enough, but a few small edits were enough to settle the fear completely.
 

What Worked

Having a storyboard & detailed plan for illustrations let me choose exactly the illustrations I wanted upfront and not waste work.

 
I'll admit, I cheated on this part. I spent spare hours throughout the weeks before starting the illustration proper working on a storyboard for the chapter, rather than starting this at the beginning of the allotted two weeks. Having this resource helped me tremendously, but interestingly, I found I consulted the catalogue of verbal descriptions of each image that I made after the storyboard was finished more frequently than I did the storyboard, itself.

I think what I needed, more than a visual plan of the chapter, was any plan to work from, at all.

I could probably work as easily from verbal descriptions, from no storyboard at all--but I think there's value in capturing visual ideas visually, first. At very least because iteration helps a drawing. The first thumbnail can tell you a lot about what will and won't work, that words wouldn't have even explored.

Doing a thorough edit of the chapter prose immediately before hooking it up let me work on the edits when I was already focused.
 

I've come to really appreciate an iterative approach to writing.

To make each chapter the best that it can be, it's crucial to seize that final opportunity to edit--especially in a serial.

I've tried making that edit at two other places in the chapter finalization process--as the first item, and as the last. Neither, I've found, is something that really works for me. If I start with the edit, then I'm not /in/ the chapter yet. It feels like a /barrier/ to the work getting done, rather than something useful and fulfilling. At the end, the edit is just more work, with the prose now being in two places (the sequenced story and the prose draft) instead of just one. Moreover, I tend to get impatient at that point, and then the edit just doesn't happen.

But I find there's naturally a lull in the process after the illustrations are scanned in. Cleaning them takes maybe half a day, and I like to start hooking them in on a new day, so I tend to have an afternoon with nothing much to do. For Emil's first chapter, this turned out to be a great place to start the edits. I was already deep into thinking about the chapter from three days of illustration, but I wasn't so deep in the prose that I couldn't see it for what it was.

The first pass over, I worked with a goal, in this case, of bringing more memories of his parents into the initial chapter. That worked really well. It's probably a good policy to always pick a goal or two for the chapter before launching in. Aimlessness breeds idleness, after all. After I'd done those larger edits, I printed the chapter out and read it with a red pen, picking out parts that didn't feel right; didn't flow right; didn't sit right.

And it worked great!

Illustrating first let me do the aligning/sequencing without interruption.

 
It might be more accurate to say, "illustration immediately after planning" was the approach I took.

Last chapter, I repeatedly had to stop sequencing, illustrate something, then go back and realign a bunch of things. Not ideal. So, illustration /definitely/ needs to be done before sequencing/alignment starts (should have been a no-brainer, but somehow I guess it wasn't).

This time, I prioritized getting all the illustrations done in the first couple of days, and it helped /so much./

Illustrating isn't the most tedious work of the job (that would be alignment), but it is the most cumbersome. For everything else--aside from the live instruments in the music--all I need is my laptop, and I'm set. But illustration wants paper, watercolours, ink, thus, a drop-sheet ... Just the setup of it is enough to make me want to avoid it, no matter how fun the work itself may be. 

Always warming up/loosening up before an illustration session let me draw faster and with more character.

 
The difference with this is honestly unreal.

Please, for any readers who don't do this already, start.

Before any illustration session, but especially something finicky, detail-extensive, or time-pressured, draw something fast, loose, and wild before you start work on the project.

I would say that my adoption of this practice is singlehandedly responsible for the jump in illustration quality between this chapter and the last, but the next point contributed, too.

Using fineliners made illustration effortless

 
For Jwa Fyair's first chapter, I illustrated in a fifty-fifty mix of ... dip pen, and ... black ballpoint.

Which makes no sense at all.

I started in dip pen, naturally.

Now, I love my dip pens, but they're cumbersome. Between the extra setup/teardown of having ink and water out, and getting nibs clean and dry in the end so they last, and the extra care they take to keep from smudging while wet, they're just a lot of extra work.

When I needed supplemental illustrations, and I had to just /get it done/ I switched to drawing with what I had on hand--which happened to be ballpoints. /Bad/ ballpoints.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the ballpoint fought with me far worse than dip pens ever did. The struggle to get a nice line out of a tool that was not made for illustration took a major toll on the art. Illustrations became stiff; lines, laboured; stilted.

This time, I happened to have my old friend, black fineliners on hand, the day I started illustrating, and I was amazed at how easily and fluidly the illustrations came out.

The lesson here: be smart about the tools you use.

Draw with crap materials when you have to--but when you don't have to, don't. And especially, use good materials for the good draft, if you can.

On the other hand, the tools you use for your standalone illustrations, when the calling of the art is in the image itself, may not be the right tools to use when you need to churn out image after image on a deadline--for comics or animations, for instance. There's things you can't beat dip pens for. For me, for now, The Roots We Grew and Severed is not one of them. When fast and consistent is what you need, choose tools that make the illustration of an individual image effortless.

Composing music in  midi first, then playing along, let me make sure everything lined up correctly from the start.

 
This was a proposition from last time that worked exactly as I hoped it would. Music went way faster this time.

What Didn't Work

Drawing every storyboard panel with the same level of finish/detail made storyboarding take too long.

 
I think storyboarding was good, but I need it to go a lot faster and easier than it did.

I don't want to cut the detail too much, because there were a few places where having it to reference was incredibly useful.

A few, I'll repeat.

Most of the storyboard frames, I barely looked at after consulting them to build the sprite catalogue.

This is a part of the process that probably needs a few more iterations of experimentation. For the next one, I'll try cutting the size of each panel in half, down to maybe 1.5"x1.0"ish.
 

Being done nearly a week before it was time to publish, with only writing to do made me waste entire days.

 
Lack of time pressure was the bane of this chapter, honestly.

I don't do well with that "what if there's not enough to do?" feeling.

Seriously. Shuts me down. I sit in a heap of anxiety and give myself a worry headache and get nothing done.

It's a little ironic, but to keep my stress down, there can't be lulls in work. There can't be flex time.

And it appears, from last week's evidence, that this means I can't schedule the last few days of a chapter allotment for chapter writing. Doesn't work. Not totally sure why, but this time at least, it resulted in abject misery.

If the chapter writing is going to get done, it needs to be scheduled in a more routine way. Spending an hour a day, every day, would probably work a lot better.
 

Allotting the entire first week to illustration let me waste entire days
 

I gave myself five days to do all the illustrations for the chapter.

And that was way too much time. So, cue panic, of course. I spent two days in bed totally out of it. (Actually not sure how causal that was, in retrospect. Hmm.) But then I worked until 21h00 on Friday night and got it done.

So, let's schedule only 3 days for illustration this time. That was about how long it actually took.

Conclusion

I think I'm definitely learning more about how to do this kind of work.

This chapter, over all, has been a massive success story.

I think it's entirely possible that in time, I could learn to do these chapters /much/ faster than one for every two weeks--which is a big relief, because I'm going to have to get a real job, too, at some point.

I'll try to pace myself for now.

Reflections on the Process: Roots Chapter 1

 As of 24 August, I have a basically complete version of The Roots We Grew and Severed, chapter 1, illustrated, scored, and hooked up, ready to publish.

The process was clunky; rocky; and took me at least forty percent longer than I'd planned, but I'm happy with the result--and I learned a lot.

Let's back up for a second. We're missing some context here.

In July 2022, I quit my day job to launch Roots.

Temporarily quit my day job. I budgeted for about six months off for full time art.

For these six months, the goals I set were:

• Perfect the chapter production process to a point of life-proof efficiency & speed
• Start cultivating a reader-base.

That's it. Not "finish book one"--not "monetize" and certainly not "become financially sustainable."

 

Well, I've been drawing up a storm, working sixty hour weeks, and I am making progress with Roots. But I've been losing the plot a little here, because the goal, above powering through the chapters, is to perfect the process--and it's been weeks since I've done any process reflection at all.

 

I want to share a reflection for every chapter I animate--

--for the rest of the "launching" period, at least.

 I'll talk about how the work went, what I learned from it, and what I'm going to try next.

This will be the first, pertaining to The Roots We Grew and Severed chapter 1.

 

Process Reflections

Chapter 1, "The Boy Luthier" follows our first main character, Jwa Fyair, through a formative time in his childhood, in his home town of Fyair Gree, Il Fenmahr.

Differences from previous process

Compared to the proof of concept chapters, the biggest shift here was in medium, both for the music, and for the illustrations.

I love the wax-crayon illustrations of the demo chapters dearly, but to most people (read, everyone who isn't Ral), crayons are strongly associated with child-art. The first few chapters of Roots are about small children, yes, but this is not a children's book in the slightest, and I eventually found the "child-like" associations of the illustration style to be a detriment.

For the real chapters, I've switched to pen and ink with watercolour as the primary visual medium. I've also made the decision to lean deliberately into multimedia eclecticism--coloured paper; crayons; permanent marker; cotton string--in order to establish immediately my intention to visually experiment throughout the work.

For the music, I decided to leave the "pure MIDI" sound behind, and include real instruments in every track. This has wreaked havoc on my process (we'll come back to that) but the results are promising.

Ethos Engine improvements

I added a more explicit (and much more usable) animation API. I needed it for auras.

What I wish I'd done:

 

1. Don't use low-res placeholder images to hook up a rough draft

Redoing alignment for images and text boxes is a waste of time.

 

Alignment is the single biggest time sink in this project. Don't repeat it unnecessarily.

Don't start hooking a scene up until you have all the assets you need. That will mean that the first "end to end playable chapter draft" for future chapters will come a lot later in the process than it did for chapter one. However, that first draft will be a lot closer to done.

2. Compose the pieces in the MIDI sequencer first, then choose parts to sub out with real instrument recordings

Trying to compose MIDI tracks on top of real recorded instruments is a nightmare. Don't do it.

The minor rhythmic eccentricities of the recorded track will work fine with one MIDI track, but not the next, until soon, you'll find you're not sure if the composition would work if everything were perfectly quantized.

Compose in the MIDI sequencer, where you can iterate as fast as you can type, and hear the result instantly. Then, once you've chosen the tracks you want to do live, you can record them against the playback of the entire, finished score.

3. Always warm up before a drawing session

So many of my drawing sessions for chapter one felt like pulling teeth. The ones that didn't were the ones when I was able to get immediately into drawing something loose and quick. Often, these were sessions that I started by drawing a page for Massina. 

 

So when you sit down to draw, start with a wild scribble, or a blind contour, or a four-panel comic drawn in four minutes.

 

Loosen up first. Then get down to business. 

 

4. Use coloured paper in scenery

All the scenes for chapter one are plain ink and watercolour. I miss the construction paper. Let's bring it back.

5. Draw fast & loose, and use scribbles in the final draft

The drawings in chapter one look stiff compared to my faster-paced projects, and they all took a stupid amount of time. I like what comes out when I sit down and scribble.

So scribble in high res--and use it.

6. Don't be afraid to spend a whole week on the initial draft

The biggest experiment of chapter one was my trial of the "completion first" approach.

The idea was to get something done end to end as fast as possible, and spend the rest of the time iterating.

It's not a bad idea in theory, but if you make the early draft too rough, all you've done is make work for yourself later in redoing what should have been done.

So strive to make something you feel decently good about first, and don't make anything rougher. It's gonna take longer. Sometimes, it might take all the time you have. Learn to be OK with that.

In conclusion

Let's do it. Let's officially publish chapter one on Monday.

As for chapter two: it's time to apply my learnings, and jump in. With any luck, I'll be ready to put it up two Mondays after that. We'll see.

If there's one thing I need to remember, it's that my first goal needs to be learning. It's early days still, and I have time.