24-hour comic day, how do I prepare?

[NickRocks]

that reminds me, anything going on for this in rochester? *looks in alex's direction*

[Inkthinker]

So I am totally planning to do Dragon's Lair tomorrow (today), here in Austin. Pencils to the page at 5PM, and the fun don't stop 'till the last man drops!

Or at least until I finish my 24, anyway.

They say they got free wifi, so I'll see if I can't post a few updates as the game plays out. My plan of the moment is to thumbnail my 24, then see if I can't get my ligne claire on. Not sure if I'll go for ink or nice pencils. Nice pencils can be considered finish quality, right? It works for Adam Warren and Joe Mad...

I guess they'll have to be REALLY nice pencils...

Out of curiousity, is it considered cheating to think about a story, so long as you do not write or draw anything? As anyone can tell you, thinking ain't working, and lord knows I've got a half-dozen stories in my back pocket that I've been thinking about for years now, but so long as I don't do more than scribble a few doodles or write the occasional bullet-point, they don't amount to jack nor shit.

I don't plan to pull any of those out for tomorrow, but I am kinda having trouble not thinking about pink elephants (whup, see, now I want to do a story about pink elephants). I guess it's kinda hard for anyone to know if you're working your 24 off an idea you had the day before (or earlier that day, or an hour before starting), but is it considered bad play to plan ahead, at least upstairs?

-EDIT-

I'm off to the race! Wish me luck!

[Inkthinker]

'bout eight hours in, got 24 pages thumbnailed (story bleagh) and ruled... Now the real drawing begins!

[Inkthinker]

Hour 13... Seems unlikely that I will complete (currently on page 03), but on the upside I have learned a valuable lesson regarding the importance of comfortable chairs. Now it's more just a death march to see how far I can get before I fold like cheap furniture.

[PTX40]

I think he's gonna die, folks.

[jharker]

I participated for the first time this year at a local comic shop. Was a lot of fun. We started at 11 in the morning and my goal during the day was to at least come up with a complete story and have 24 pages in pencils before midnight (even if it was loose pencils).

I actually managed to do that, and it seemed a more efficient proces than just winging it and take it one page at a time like most people surrounding me were doing. But around midnight I tried to ink those rough pencils and it was terrible.
I havent inked anything in an analogue way in a while and even when doing it digitally I'm pretty clueless about properly inking a page.

I didn't have any access to a computer (which was both a blessing and a curse) and tried to do it by hand. But I also didn't have a lightbox, and the see-through paper I tried to ink on, is terrible for inking. So after a couple of tries I gave up.
But I'm glad I at least have a complete 24-page story I can finish without having to think about how to resolve the story. That's more than anything I've done before comics wise, so I'm pretty happy about how it went.

I did come up with a vague idea what I wanted to do the day before the event itself. But all it amounted to was; I have no idea what to put on paper, I wish someone could just open my mind and show me an idea I have lying in my subconcience. That led to the idea to do somewhat of a parody of Inception. That was all there was to it, and the actual events of the story I thought out during the first hour doing thumbnail sketches of the layout. So i don't feel bad about that.

Working out the story was actually less difficult than I thought it would be. Maybe it helped that I could use the layered structure of the Inception idea, and use that to work out the story beats. But I thought I would have a much harder time to get a story in within those 24 pages. I also found that it really came in handy to keep the layout of the pages simple.

Anyway, I had a great experience, and look forward to finishing up those pages. I'm actually looking forward to next year and try real hard to finish everything within that 24 hour period.

[Inkthinker]

Oh, yeah. I totally went down in flames. If you're gonna fail, I say "fail spectacularly!"

Out of a projected 24, I finished... (drum roll, please)...

Four.



Though I did get all 24 laid out in thumbnail form, with a narrative and an ending and all (though I wasn't happy with it. Oversold the stakes in the plot, turning what was intended to be a humorous ending into a dark one). I figure I will try and complete the story, if only for the fun and practice.

And I had a good time hanging out with other artists, and I saw how a few people did complete the challenge, so I learned some lessons form the whole mess as well. Next year I'll be better prepared, and if I don't beat it I'll at least make a better showing!

LESSONS LEARNED:

1) Get a comfortable seat. Seriously, by the 18th hour my neck and my ass were in serious pain. Folding chairs are not good seats for 24-hour hauls.

2) Choose a simple style that you can execute swiftly. One of the guys who did a great job on his did so with a style that was essentially an extension of stick-figures and simple cartoon style (great narrative, though. Funny stuff!). Another guy did the job using a style that he was able to basically freehand straight to ink (also pretty cartoony, much darker narrative). My mistake was even thinking I could pull this out of my ass using my usual comics style, which is WAY too intense for a challenge like this. I usually do a page-per-day drawing that way... so technically, I worked four times faster than usual!

3) Plan your time effectively. one of the more interesting things I saw later in the event was a printout someone had that suggested a 45-minute-per-page schedule that allowed for 15-minute breaks (in theory you could bunch 'em together for meals or even a nap). Had I planned out something that would work in that type of frame, it might have gone better for me.

I had a blast just the same. I'm totally going to want to do this again next time... just not the way I tried to do it this time.

[Inkthinker]

Oh, also... I don't think it's necessarily cheating to think of the idea beforehand. At least, it seemed that way amongst pretty much everyone else there. So long as you don't put anything to paper (not one word or design or layout), I think it's in keeping with the spirit of the competition.

I did lose a solid 6 hours just trying to write up and thumbnail the story. I did it by writing backwards for most of it... coming up with the ending, then figuring out how the character got there. Which kinda worked, but it has the drawback that it's hard to scale the plot points effectively (making things kick up a notch with every twist). It's hard to come up with ideas that get you into place while being less interesting/exciting/cool than the place you need to get to, so that when you move forward the narrative builds.

Ah, well... the whole point of the exercise (aside from being a badass) is to learn something, and I did that. Boy, howdy, did I ever.

[basil81]

So, Ink, you gonna show us what you did or what?

[jharker]

I did it by writing backwards for most of it... coming up with the ending, then figuring out how the character got there. Which kinda worked, but it has the drawback that it's hard to scale the plot points effectively (making things kick up a notch with every twist). It's hard to come up with ideas that get you into place while being less interesting/exciting/cool than the place you need to get to, so that when you move forward the narrative builds.

What i did was structure the story in a couple of sequences. The story actually ended up being the opposite of building to a climax. I'm not sure if it suffers because of that, because I don't know how it reads to someone else. But it did really help me in being efficient in knowing which sequences needed the most attention when I would start drawing.

I had the set up and the ending in place, both taking up about two pages. So I knew those pages had to be consistent in quality and details. (in my story those scenes didn't take place in the dream world, so they had to look similar).

So I had 20 pages to play around in for the "story'. I figured the actual events in between the end en beginning would have the three act structure. So I used the second act to find the macguffin and the third act to make it back to the ending.
I chose to make the second act not overly exiting as it dealt with the macguffin and also had to wrap up the story. So that ended up being my character looking and finding the macguffin in a hallway of doors. That way I could save on the background details (and it made it a nod to the second act of inception in a way, so that worked out).

As the ending sequence was basically a reflection on what happened, and the second act was already wrapping it up, I knew the third act only served as a bridge to the ending. So that sequence got the shaft.

It ended up being a scene where my character basically ends up walking around a white page looking for an exit to the story. I knew I wanted to have a sequence in there that could be more abstract and simplistic like that, so I only had to draw what was absolutely necessary. So it worked out that I could place it there near the end t. I didn't want that joke to take too long so it was only two pages.

I wanted the first act to take it up a notch after the beginning and be the most exiting and detailed and probably the longest sequence. So I could divide the rest ot 18 pages between the first and the second act and see how much detail I could put in both.

So I ended up with a story that starts with a bang and then goes smaller and smaller. But since Empire strikes back also has a weird narrative like that,and still works as a movie, I'll refer to that as my excuse.

I had no idea what the hell I was doing, but structuring the story in smaller chunks and picking which ones would have priority really worked for me. I think if I also had settled on only having tight pencils at the end I might have actually made it within the 24 hour period.

Also, I decided I had to put in at least one spread and also ended up with one additional splash page. I figured I could use those for the end and treat them more as illustrations. i thought it would be helpful to at least have a couple of pages where I could focus on the drawing, and less on the storytelling because it's easier to balance the time/balance when you can focus on one drawing.


just my 2 cents.