Back March 27, 2024
Vertical slice
A vertical slice is like a tiny bite of a sandwich, you get to taste the ingredients, but it’s not a meal.
Some of the “ingredients” involved are:
Honestly, I’m not strictly following a “recipe”. In fact, I’ve been known to substitute Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce.
Against all odds, I can still show you a sneak peek of the vision.
Let’s break down the ingredients.
Writing
I’ve spent a few weeks writing and rewriting the story, and it’s shaping up nicely. However, as you can see above, the story is moving faster than what feels natural, so I’ll probably need a few months to really polish it.
I had hoped the opening I wrote in screenplay format would easily transfer to a comic book page, but the transformation proved to be non-trivial. Let me show you the writing tools I’m using.
- Brainstorming: Obsidian
- The graph view is my preferred way to find orphaned ideas.
- To sync these notes between my machines, I use Dropsync.
- The graph view is my preferred way to find orphaned ideas.
- Document format:
.fountainfile- I use the Fountain markup language to write everything.
- That way, if necessary, I can easily convert it into another format later on.
- Document editor: VS Code and the Better Fountain extension.
- Admittedly, it’s a bit unorthodox to use a code editor for creative writing, but it works!
- An unintended side effect of using VS Code is that now I’m naturally using git to version-control the story.
- Admittedly, it’s a bit unorthodox to use a code editor for creative writing, but it works!
- Formatter: afterwriting
- Fountain files are intuitive to write, but not enjoyable to read, so exporting to another format is a must.
- For example, exporting to PDF can be done through the following command:
afterwriting --source shozar.fountain --pdf shozar.pdf --config config.json
Storyboarding
Storyboarding and panelling are intertwined: a page can only hold so many ideas.
Different page structures carry different emotions. For example, take a look at these 3 variations.
I’m no expert at any of this, so I’ve been brute forcing the perfect panel by coming up with many variants, asking people what feelings are provoked by the shape of the page, and then going from there.
One day I’ll be able to generate the right panel without much assistance.
Drawing
I begged my talented wife to doodle some characters with a sharpie on standard printer paper. It took her all of 2 minutes to draw this on the first try. Some people are just built differently, truly.
I found an old scanner tucked away in a closet (CanoScan LiDE 120), crossed my fingers for a Linux driver, and started scanning away at 300 dpi.
In GIMP, there’s a wonderful Despeckle filter (radius 5, black level 42, white level 213) that rounds off the rough edges. Then, I use the Levels filter to normalize the colors, and also to make it easier to remove the background.
Paneling
Most of the assembly happens in Inkscape.
The grid snapping feature and the straight-line tool let me move pretty quickly here.
My favorite part is throwing together all the assets, as this is when the magic begins to emerge.
Coloring
As an experiment, I contacted several artists on Instagram open to commissions, each at different price points.
In my opinion, the winner was Marcelo, whose version is the one on display in the vertical slice.
Can you see the resemblance to one of his older pieces?
So, there you have it!
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