Weekly 2018-05-28: The backstage of episode 25

Hey Patrons! Last week I had the time to make a new video tutorial ( how to do the "dark matter particle effect with Krita" ), show the Android e-Reader of Imsesaok in a video, work on the scenario for episode 26 and also work on general maintenance.  

The long production of episode 25 left a lot of files around, and today I propose you a quick tour on what I found on my disk:

Defining the height of the witches

Making this type of graphics was necessary to keep good relative size across the panels of this episode. I could deduce funny things: Thyme is 1m12 tall (44 inch).

Refactoring the storytelling

The initial story was written for seven pages. Here is an overview of the storyboard in January. 

after working on it, I thought it wasn't fluid enough to read. I then re-adapted the short story to fit ten pages :

The final version ( the one you can read online ) came after a re-compression of panels during the final drawing step.  

Sequence simplified: Pepper and wind in her hair

A panel was confusing during the beta-test: just right after Cumin summon the butterfly ; Pepper was in background receiving the wind in her hair. 

The focus of the panel was too much on what Pepper was feeling about the wind and not about the butterfly generating wind. It was problematic and so I decided to simplify it. 

I feel lucky to have the beta-test team around the project. It is really previous to can test the episode and receive early feedback before the final release.

The pages refactored:

I started to colorize page 01, page 02 and even a bit of page 03 around February. But the intro was refactored later totally differently because I changed the storyboard:

- The effect in pink of the explosion wasn't looking good

- The storytelling was very compressed: a lot of mini insert panel on the corner to try to do a continuity on the storytelling. 

- The butterfly was a special creature at that time: an impressive half-butterfly-dragon with infinite symbol on the wings. I thought later it was more powerful for Cumin to summon a simple blue butterfly. 

Here is how this old version was looking before the refactoring :

Perspective work:

Many panels required complex perspective grids. Here are two examples:

That's all for this week, right now you can see a lot of activity on the project sources ,  I'll speak about that later. Thank you again for supporting my effort on the Pepper&Carrot webcomic!