This week I’m more deliberately trying out one of the transition types Scott McCloud mentions in his Making Comics. This is the aspect-to-aspect transitions – that is, a set of images each showing a small piece of a single moment.
Here’s a look at the full scene I’ll be breaking into pieces:
Rosie, as you might have guessed, is having a pirate adventure.
After staging her, I took about 30 shots from all kinds of angles and distances, like this:
I could have done it in far fewer shots, but I kept thinking of things I wanted to add to the scene 🙂
Then I cropped the shots to emphasize just the parts I wanted to highlight, like this:
Rosie holds a sword. Follow her adventures at www.mydolladventure.com
On Friday, when I do my adventure, I’ll show the different aspects that make up that scene. Ideally, I’d lay them out on a page, but I don’t quite know how to do that yet. So, I’ll probably just stream them down the page the way I’m doing now.
Aspect-to-aspect transitions do two things: they slow the scene down, and they make the reader work to assemble the complete picture in their mind.
And that’s my main work this week. Rosie’s episode is carrying a pretty complex plot element, so I’ll probably spend some time trying to figure out the most graceful way of explaining that, in pictures.
I’m reading through a few graphic novels I got out of the library – one of the Sandman books, Will Eisner’s Contact with God, and two others that I can’t recall right now. Great inspiration, although I’m years away from being able to bring all of the pieces together to make a full photographic novel.