Some notes on the ongoing production of my CG based, sci-fi, crime-thriller graphic novel: The Lightstream Chronicles

According to the script, there are somewhere between 212 and 230 pages of sequential art that needs to be created for the book to come to completion. At an average of 5 per page, the math tells me that there could be some 1,100 renderings that need to happen. More math: If I hope to complete it this year, that equates to 3.28 renderings per day. That would have to include post production; any Photoshop work that I need to do. But that’s just the rendering part of the project. There’s still dialog and page layout. I could probably do a more exact breakdown, but why bother? It’s huge.

While I acknowledge that this should plunge me into deep depression, I fully expect that some scenes will go more quickly than others. Scenes with dialog, without a lot of character movement and mostly “camera” work (I have several of these) are a “light-once-move-camera-shoot” proposition. I have been on enough live action shoots, however, to know that it’s not that easy. Sometimes lighting a close-up can take hours.

The most time consuming scenes are (and will be) the sweeping establishing shots, like flying over Hong Kong, Sean’s expansive synth lab, police headquarters, and the epic chase scene through the city.

Character Design

So far, all I have published is my character designs, which, so far, are pretty close to final though I have fully redesigned Sean and I have a first pass at Techman.

Sean Nakamura

I realize that, if you have followed the blog for the past year, you already know the basic story and you can glean some insight from the character descriptions that have been posted on DevArt and CGSociety, but even then, this name dropping doesn’t make much sense.

Scenes and proof of concept

For my 5th quarter thesis review, I have committed to completing an entire scene as proof of concept. Perhaps this will go online as a bit of an introduction. The scene I have chosen occurs early in the book where Sean Nakamura, the prodigy designer of synthetic, near-humans, is wrapping things up in his lab. The lab is one of those huge establishing shots that I was talking about and it starts out with a fly-over of Hong Kong with a zoom-in to through the windows of his penthouse laboratory at Almost Human Corporation (AHC). The strategy, thus far, is to build out as much of the lab as possible to focus in on the dialog.  The body of the scene takes place from pages 15 through 19. It would be great to add the big tension scene immediately thereafter on page 20 and 21, but this would require significantly more modeling, so it’s a long shot.

Conceivably, we could have these 7 pages by mid-to-late March. Snails pace. I know. It will get faster. Really.

Strange that my last post was on the day Steve Jobs died. No relation, however. Part of the challenge in moving forward on the graphic novel is that this is also part of my thesis for my MFA. Hence, there are two parts, as I have blogged about before. The first part is the project itself. The second part is the scholarly work that gets me my degree, which will also authorize me to teach design. Without turning this into a lengthy excuse on why I have not blogged prior to this, suffice to say that between teaching and writing, visuals have taken something of a back seat.

New developments have occurred in the meantime. I have received word from Iridescent, the Journal of Design Research that my paper submitted last June has advanced to peer review. That surprised me. I guess it took so long that I had pretty much forgotten about it, and I think that a lot of papers that get submitted to these “Call for Papers” things sometimes go without a response at all. Of course, since June I have done a considerable amount of new writing on the subject and the whole idea of design fiction as it applies to my project. Clearly, at this point I’m seeing my effort at design fiction as both a work of fiction and a work of design, which definitely makes it a hybrid of that concept as defined by Sterling and Bleecker. Certainly, it makes it wildly ambitious, since it takes on many dimensions, including an interesting form of design research. I will elaborate on that in a different post.

As for the project, my thesis committee was pushing hard for more back-story. Imagine, asking questions like, “How did we get here?” I was considering this stuff possibly too tedious. Nevertheless, I think I have found some exciting new devices that can weave back-story into the body of the work without being boring. The fact is, I’ve done a lot of research into why and how the world got to the way I have depicted it in 2159 — why not weave it in?

Finally (for this post), I am staring down what they call 5th Quarter Review. This is the point in your thesis journey where you report to your committee on what the heck you are doing and show some work and progress. Theoretically, they can tell you to go back to the drawing board, or to look for some other career, or give you the thumbs up. In most cases, they tell you to make some additions and move forward. I have been staying in touch with them regularly and though we have had some bumps in the road, I think we are on the same page. My goal for 5QR is to have an entire scene from the book rendered, a couple of spreads of back-story and my thesis introduction, and outline complete. So, I will be busy this quarter, too.

Hopefully I will keep blogging throughout. Though I have plenty to talk about — no promises

I have an observation that I find continually reaffirms itself. If you study man-made concoction long enough, you will find something to change. It was an unwritten rule from my agency, and design firm days that you should never leave a presentation image up for more than 5 minutes or somebody will find something wrong with it. With a few rare exceptions, that is a good rule of thumb. Unfortunately, when you are working on a project that takes a year to complete you find yourself looking back at past decisions that will ultimately have to be incorporated into a finished work some time in the future. There is no guarantee that a year from now I will like what I see. Already, despite the fact that I labored long and hard over my eight character designs—posting nothing without lengthy inspection and scrutiny— there are changes I know I will have to make. And then, there’s that title. I’ve decided to tweak that, too.

Graphic novel. If you set up a Google Alert for the term, (in quotes) you will get a fair amount of daily chatter. The kinds of books that crop up are more likely to be titles like Habibi, or Blankets, Watchmen, Maus, a Kickstarter project, and that sort of thing. You don’t seem to get a lot of discussion, these days, on whether or not the term is a good one or not. Most people in the biz and in the library system have accepted the graphic novel as probably a longer form than a standard “serial” comic,  and whether or not it is a compilation of several “serial” comics under one story arc into a single, bound novel, it probably steers toward older readers with story lines that are not conventional comic book themes. Since many graphic novels are one-off, stand-alone works, this can be another differentiating feature. I emphasize the work probably because there are always exceptions. With that being said, there is still a certain pretentiousness that accompanies the term through no fault of its own. Some people will use the term because it helps define the book as of the aforementioned types. Others will use the term in an attempt to ascribe some sort of weightiness or affectation of greater worthiness over comic book fare. Alas, there is nothing you can do about that. When I use the term it is to let people know that this is a long form comic.

With all that said, at this point, sticking”The Graphic Novel” into the title of my book now strikes me as dumb, so I’m taking it out. The new title (which I’m still considering a working title) is simply, LIGHTSTREAM Moment of Truth. You can call it a graphic novel if you want and I will still refer to it that way. You can call it sequential art storytelling. You can call it an illustrated novel. You can call it whatever you want, but in the final analysis it’s a story. It’s a book.

I’ve made this subtle change on most of the postings (except for the concept art on my web site, I hope to get to that this week). Changes, changes, changes.

I’ll tell you more about the research aspect that I’m involved in this quarter in a later post.

The Enforcer Synth is the latest supporting character in my graphic novel. Enforcers are part of the Elite Corps that report to Col. Lee Chen. They specialize in tactical enforcement and crowd control. A regular presence in the worst parts of the city, they spend much of their time policing “downtown” which is hundreds of floors below “top city” where the “respectable folks hang out. Downtown is old, decaying, a hot bed for techno-crime, and vice of every kind imaginable — and some unimaginable. It’s dirty and crowded; a cross between Vegas and the old Kowloon. This is the place for re-skinning parlors, black-market organs, implants and technology to elude the omnipresent surveillance of the New Asia Police. Not a place for the timid. You can get the whole synopsis on my site, and see a hi-res version on DevArt.

It’s a back to school week, so I’ll get to more updates this weekend.

I thought I would share with you some of the source images for Hong Kong 2, the metropolis where my graphic novel takes place. As I have revealed in some previous posts, we’re looking at a mega city on the North American mainland 148 years from now. I don’t want to reveal too many particulars that are central to the narrative but essentially the identity of this city has become a conglomeration of 22nd century architecture mixed in with a hundred years or so of Asian-style city stacking. A trip to Tokyo, or China and you quickly begin to see what happens when you have to stack more and more people into a finite area. Generally, you build higher, connect-on, and do a lot of retro-fitting. In the graphic novel, the high-rise now floats up there around 150 or more floors and that’s where you find the more affluent social groups. The closer you get to the street, it gets poorer, darker and considerably more dangerous. Though this was never touched on (to my recollection) in the movie Blade Runner, I recently saw a piece of promotional video from Ridley Scott that featured interviews with Scott, Douglas Trumbull, and Syd Mead that discussed much of the art direction for the film classic. Apparently they had a similar dystopia in mind.

Here are some images I collected from the web and my travels that give a peek into the kind of city texture I’m thinking of.

It has been about a week since I posted my concept art for the upcoming graphic novel. Thanks to all the encouraging emails and Facebook messages from friends. Response from outside the “circle of friends” has been slow. Possibly it wasn’t such a great idea to slide this out over Labor Day weekend. My rationale for getting this out so far in advance is to get some conversation going about both the project and academic paper that goes along with it. Patience is a virtue. If there was a magical formula for social networking, I suppose, everyone would be going viral, all the time. response has been 99% positive, with some reservations about my 7th character Marie. It’s difficult to explain when you haven’t read the script but one thing you need to keep in mind is that the story takes place 148 year in the future. If you think things have changed since you were in school, think about that kind of time frame. We’re looking at major upheavals in politics, religion, even the human body. We’re grappling with epic shifts in the way people look at the world and their lives, their perceptions, their lifespans, their ethics, their technology, their taboos, and their existential struggles. Even though the story falls somewhere in the sci-fi, crime thriller genre, all of this other is the swirling cultural backdrop that becomes part of the story’s texture. I think it makes a good narrative doubly fun to jump into.

Since posting I have attempted to take care of some other business, like getting ready to teach Design 251 in about 10 days, and general life stuff.

As the production schedule goes, I still have a few characters to tweak and I have been modeling away at more 22nd century props that will be part of my future design world. The next major undertaking is thumbnails for the hundred-some pages that will comprise the book.  I think this is an essential phase. (In fact, I am taking a sequential imaging class at ACCAD in the fall where storyboarding is on the docket.) Putting my people into a sequential narrative format is where the rubber meets the road. Thumbnails will provide a visual roadmap for the project, essentially telling me what I need to render, what will be in each scene and the overall flow of the story.

I hope to have this phase complete, or at least well underway by December so that I can focus on rendering the imagery.

If you have comments on the art or story, (here’s the links again:1. DeviantArt, 2. the CGSociety, 3. scottdenison.com Ultra hi-res images are on DeviantArt which is set up for big files), please join the discussion.

Phase 1 of my graphic novel project is now online. The book will be titled: LIGHTSTREAM The Graphic Novel: Moment of Truth.

Here is the synopsis.

The year is 2159. One major, global government — New Asia — has engulfed most of Europe and North America. The government maintains tight control of the Lightstream — the evolved Internet — as well as rights and freedoms. Science has made it possible to manufacture life-like bionic persons. Known as synthetics, these bionics are found in all walks of life and can be virtually indistinguishable from humans.

In the former America, the largest city is New Hong Kong (also known as HK2). Here, the celebrity-son of a high-ranking government official is brutally attacked and left for dead. Police investigator Keiji-T, the latest in synthetic technology is assigned to the case. Under pressure from above, Keiji is given 24 hours to find the truth or to pin the crime on “the usual suspects”.  Though confident that his highly advanced programming has prepared him for the task, Keiji suddenly encounters conflicting instructions from a mysterious data implant.

In the next 24 hours Keiji, together with his human and synthetic counterparts, must unravel what is true and false in a world where it is difficult to tell what is real.

There you have it. Concept art is being showcased in several places. 1. DeviantArt, 2. The CGSociety, 3. scottdenison.com Ultra hi-res images are on DeviantArt which is set up for big files.

A few notes on design which you probably have gathered from my previous blog posts. I have another year of work on roughly 100 pages of CG but this is the look and feel that I will be working toward on every page. Since the entire graphic novel will be built in CG, that makes the scope of the project enormous. I have had to resort to starting with base stock models primarily for figures, clothing and and some background architecture. This is something I’ve wrestled with this for a long time but if I have to create everything myself the project will never be finished and most of these have been greatly customized and 90% of the environments, vehicles and props are all custom using Maya and Modo. The rendering is in Bryce. There is only minor retouching in Photoshop and the framing and typography are using Illustrator.

Comments welcome.

I’m taking Labor Day off. Hope you enjoy.

There is little in the way of academic thought today as I have been crunching away at my self-imposed deadline to finish my eight key characters this week. I’m happy to report that I’m running renders on the last one right now. This one is turning out to be it’s own unique challenge, as they all have been, but will probably require numerous render passes and more compositing than the others.

I’ve also decided to make DeviantArt my launching point for these characters. I thought about doing it right here but this blog is not really set up for large imagery and DevArt handles that pretty well. Plus, these are the people who really appreciate the work that goes into this so it makes sense. I’ll be adding them to scottdenison.com but in a lower res format.

Now, the question is: one a day, or all at once? I’ve created a template for the characters that links them all into the book title and supplies some basics on who they are. There will be a story synopsis to accompany the launch, but it’s going to be a year before the 500 or more panels are complete so after this, folks are just going to have to use their imagination. I’m thinking that to keep things alive until the book is finished I’ll be posting random renders, scenes, props, “diegetic prototypes”, (there, I made my academic contribution) and such. And, of course, I will keep everyone in the loop on progress.

This autumn I will be teaching Basic Design at OSU, which is a heavy 2:45 studio, three days a week. No telling, at this point, how much it will eat into my design time on the book. We’ll have to wait and see.

With characters and script, synopsis and page grid nearing completion, I am poised at the threshold of an epic design journey and the production phase of my MFA thesis. Through my work this past summer, I have already begun to construct the context for this future, the story of the characters, their lives, and their world and visualize it within the constructs of a science fiction graphic novel. For this future prototype, I have chosen a new visual style — not film, not hand drawing — but stylized realism from computer-generated imagery (CGI) to further enrich the story, the cultural legibility, the theoretical visualization, the experience, and the emotional resonance.

As I have blogged before, I want this to be a great read, but for the designer it is also something more. This project is a multi-layered examination of the conjugation of design and narrative. With a trip to the latest superhero flick, there is clear evidence that we now have the technology to envision virtually anything, any world, any impossible feat and any disaster. Within these virtual visualizations, our design—our stuff—often taken for granted, supplies context and cohesion. The more the design reflects the culture the more real and reasonable the premise — the more virtual the vision. Thus, on one level, design blends into Bleecker’s[1] background providing credible context for a future vision.

On another level, design also becomes an accelerant for our culture and society. If the design around us, in our messages, our products, our tools, and our lifestyles is so inextricably woven in our culture, then it bears examination of what we make and how it will affect culture — perhaps before we simply wait and see.

Design also participates in the storytelling exercise and the way that future worlds can be prototyped. The graphic novel becomes a means to create a visual prototype of one such world in a fashion arguably less costly than filmmaking, where the designer gets to ask the holistic question of what design will be like a hundred years from now in the context of people’s lives wrapped in a compelling narrative.

The examination is multi-fold. The designer must create a purely hypothetical drama, then speculate on how it might be made real, how design can contribute to authenticity, what new things and ideas might be woven into the texture of human lives, and pulling threads of science fact into science fiction create the visuals and style to serve as prototype and narrative guide through a coherent order utilizing the conventions of the art form and the tools of the graphic designer.

At the end of the journey is introspection and conversation on the implications of such a journey for design practitioners as contributors to future media, entertainment, artifacts and information.

Possibly this is more real to me after having done it for 30+ years, but it seems that this is about design habits, and the tried-and-true that we exercise every day in the practice of commercial design, back and forth over the same territory, forging ruts and channels that make us and our design so predictable. In many ways, if we never stop and ask, “What if?” we will never spark that new synapse that will lead us to the untapped possibilities. Design should do that, too.

[1] Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. (37)