I made a comic book page of one of my favorite scenes from TV. This is an abridged version of the last scene of the first episode of Black Sails, a show about outcasts raging against the ropes of civilization. I know that sounds dramatic (because the show is) but it’s the best TV show I’ve ever seen. The show is premised as a prequal to Treasure Island, and this is the infamous Captain Flint’s call for his crew to hunt the treasure that ends up playing such a big role in the book.

This isn’t a word-for-word transcription of Flint’s speech, but it gets hits the major points. There is some context before this about why Flint is covered in blood and why some of the crew members look skeptical, but this speech is what kicks off the whole rest of the series, in more ways than one. I took screenshots of the scene and laid them out on a canvas, put an oil paint effect filter over them to get more of that comic book feel, and placed the speech bubbles in Krita. I once again had to place the text in Microsoft Paint, but I’m very happy with the result. I think it communicates the feeling of the scene very well. Once again, I cannot recommend this show enough-that was really all this was an excuse to do-to anyone who likes sweeping adventures, historical fantasy interwoven with real life figures, and really good LGBT representation. All the gay pirates, need I say more?

This is a family scene from the movie Tombstone where Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo square off. They end up not drawing their guns and both live to fight another day. The epic quote when Johnny Ringo asks Wyatt Earp and his brother Virgil if they want to “play for blood?” Doc Holiday inserts himself into this fight with a simple calm, cool and Southern accent, “I’m your Huckleberry, that’s just my game.”

I decided to do this one as comic books are one of my things so I figured it would be fun. I also had an app called Comic Book! on my iPad that I thought would make this assignment easy, but I was mistaken. The video I downloaded from YouTube was not good quality so the photos I grabbed from it (using an app called Movie Capture) were equally of low quality. Below was my first attempt; it was ok but I thought I could do better. I then tried to screen shot from the movie I have on iTunes but they had some anti-pirating software that just gave me a black screen. So I played the movie on my computer and took photos with my iPhone which gave me a better quality that I ended up using. Of course I had looked on the Internet for some good photos to use but none were of the scene I was trying to show. I learned a lot from this assignment and made some cartoon shots of myself and my pets.

One of my favorite shows is Broad City. It stars two girls who live in New York and get into very funny situations. I wanted to do this assignment on a show because it connects more with me than a movie scene would. I screenshot 21 stills from an episode called “The Matrix,” about Abbi and Ilana attending a dog wedding. Before the event, they end up on a massive search online and end up losing site of reality. All editing was done through Photoshop. I couldn’t quiet get the colors more cartoonish but I tried to feature other aspects of a comic strip. Enjoy:

The Women comic strip

I was a layout editor in high school, so I was excited for the challenge of creating a comic strip from a movie scene. I mean, that’s basically what yearbook editing is, presenting a year’s worth of high school action into a single book of head shots.

I chose to work with my favorite movie “The Women,” which I used as inspiration before and selected the scene when Mary confronts her husband’s mistress. The greatest obstacle in using this scene was translating the tension between the women without the subtle nuances of the actresses. The movie has several action packed scenes, but I liked the idea of using design to drive home the mood, rather than action. There is very little moment in the scene and the women remain steely cold throughout the scene but the heat between their words is palatable.

I used Microsoft word to create the comic. I first screen shot different parts of the scene from a YouTube video. I worked panel by panel, determining size and alignment using a grid pattern, adding dialogue with text boxes, and cropping images as necessary. I then exported the pages to PDF form for use. At this point, I reviewed some colleagues work , namely Jordan’s From Screen to Page and Katelyn’s Screen to Page and determined my work didn’t look ‘drawn’ enough. Since the movie is black and white, I hadn’t altered the imaging at all. I went back and effected the images with the ‘paint brush’ effect in Microsoft word.

Stylist choices

I wanted the first frame, the first moment Mary declares who she to be seen as important. The reader should be aware this means something, even if they don’t know the story before this point. The imagery dominates half the page and Mary’s dialogue is almost centered and in a larger font than the rest of the strip. It’s also align directly with Crystal’s eye line, focusing the words like a laser towards her. 

Next, my goal was to create the feeling of the air being sucked out of the room. Each woman realizes who the other is and lock into each intensely. In the movie this is created by individual close-ups, which I mimic in the strip, but I tightened the frame and off centered the image. In this vacuum of space I hope to create a sense that the woman are verbal moving closer, “at each other’s throats” so to speak. Te white space isolates them from the surrounding environment and the word bubbles invade personal space between them. But after these four frames, we pull back out and realize they haven’t moved an inch. There is still a vast amount space between them, indication the tension is all mental.

For the last three panels, we begin to see the slightest bit of action, which I try to illustrate by frame selection showing Crystal fidget. In juxtaposition, we see Mary hold her ground in a rather stoic fashion, yet both women continue to throw jabs verbally at one another. Additionally, Mary’s words stay steady and aimed at Crystal’s eye line, while Crystal’s dialogue is jumpy and misses the mark of Mary. Really, the whole dynamic is fabulous – credit to the director, not me! Crystal is physically higher up, but Mary’s demeanor throughout the scene gives her more power – brilliant, but I digress.

I hope you are as enthralled by the performances via my comic strip.

This was a tough assignment! I went through a lot of trial and error to get to my end result. I first had to go screen shot the scenes from the movie that I wanted to use. I decided to pick a fan favorite with Mean Girls because the drama in that movie lends itself to a dramatic cartoon strip. Once I got all the individual images I then put an effect on it to make it look more cartoon-like. After that I had a tough time figuring out how to arrange them to look like a comic strip and be able to add in text bubbles. I finally found this site called Canva where I could upload images and arrange them into a comic strip template. Then to add text bubbles I found a free website called Speechable. This site also works as a social media sharing platform, so my image is shared on there as well! Once I completed all these trial and error attempts I was left with my final product. I am pretty happy with how it turned out, just wish it did not take me so long to complete!! I recommend going to look at my comic strip shared on Speechable here because the image gets blurry the larger I stretch it on here!

From Screen to Page – 4 Stars

For this assignment I had to take a movie scene and design it into a comic. I am not a big movie fan and I wanted to stick with the superhero theme. I decided to choose Suicide Squad. Out of the whole movie, this scene from the bar is my favorite. I found the bar scene on Youtube and screen shot the parts that I needed. I then took the screenshots and used Online Photo to Cartoon Converter to make the images look more like a comic book does. I then made a collage in the order that I wanted and added their words in. I honestly didn’t even think about adding the ‘GRRR!’ sticker until I got to that part. It seemed weird to just type ‘GRRR!’ so when I found that sticker it was perfect! I wish that the scene was a bit brighter so that the villains would be easier to see but other than that I think it turned out nicely.