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.