Wednesday 26 February 2014

Japanese Woodcut Workshop

Japanese woodblock workshop today with Hiroko Imada - getting my geese on. Were they worth the large blister now festering from carving plywood for an hour? I say yes, my middle finger disagrees.


Wednesday 19 February 2014

SCRIVENER

Not much in the way of artwork over the New Year period as it's writing time!

While I love filling pages of cheap notepads with incoherent ramblings as much as the next sensitive soul, there comes a time when these dog eared carriers of semi-abstract scrawl have to be translated into something relatable.

There is a programme available to demo for free and to purchase for about £30 out there called Scrivener. Now I'm no expert; having dabbled with Word during the agency admin years of darkness, I  now tend to open everything in wordpad/textedit whenever possible. However, I'm having a real good time with Scrivener.

This programme apparently replicates a lot of features from Final Draft for a fraction of the price. I have always feared that the introduction of a computer to my scripting workflow may rob me of my trad-mojo, but while writing a one shot 8-16 page story poses few issues of plot/character destination and continuity, when writing ongoing story instalments, I was all over the shop! Moments of inspiration are all well and good, but having no way to clearly order these nuggets meant that good ideas got overlooked and not so good ideas took up far too many pages to trawl through, having no visual checkpoints to keep one disciplined.

Anyway, a good writer will no doubt have their own methods of dealing with these concerns, Scrivener seems handy as you can...

Create flashcards with plot outlines
Import reference material to view within the programme
Split windows to have easy access to earlier points in your story/your plot outlines and goals for each section
Save character names as autofill option
Add pages at any point
Autoformat your document for comic scripting

Hmm, it all sounds a bit dry on a list and there's many other features to discuss, but with a short intro written with comics in mind, I started to enjoy the process of breaking down story ideas into something approaching cohesiveness. No doubt, all these processes can be replicated using pen and paper, but such is the age that most research happens online and to have a programme for musings, goals, gathered facts and final output seems handy. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone writing comics who may be searching for a way to weave all those disparate threads into a pleasing form.