Screen 4: From Story to Script to Screen

Screen 4 is the first interior, and gives us a chance to meet our "femme fatale" in this story -- Laura. if anyone gets that name-check, you let me know.

This, basically, is the chunk of story that I was working with for this screen:

The office was a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches-neither of which were anywhere near this place. There was no-one behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room. We rang the bell.

I remember the feeling that hit me when she walked out. Her face was like a painting I had seen once and stared at wondering. Nick started in on her instantly--I recognized that look; his face went a little white, and his smile came out, wolfish, charming.
"Hi."

She smiled at us. She was short, with black hair, pale skin, her face a little round. She had glasses on with thick frames that made her look young, poor, and smart all at the same time. She was pretty, but not in a California way. She was wearing a blue knee-length dress and a black faux-fur coat.

"Hi," Nick drawled. "We need a room and some gas." He leaned over the counter and nudged me in the shin (my signal).

And here is how I converted it to script format. I made a major change, and decided to use a film noir technique of heavy foreshadowing here. I want the reader to know that some of the characters are doomed, but just be wondering how . . . and more importantly, who will survive. Not as extreme a technique as D.O.A or Sunset Boulevard, both films which start with dead narrators, but I wanted Zuda readers to know up-front that there would be a bodycount.

Screen 4: Divided horizontally again. One widescreen panel along the top, then two panels below.

Panel 1: The office is a shabby little room, with handwritten notes on the walls about smoking (none in the rooms) and checkout times, a chipped formica countertop, and dusty posters of desert island vistas and palm trees on beaches. Happy people in ‘50s bathing suits grin out from the beach photos on the walls. The shot is from behind the two men, with the Narrator still on the driver’s side, slightly frame left, Nick to the center, ringing the old fashioned bell.

SFX: Ding!

Caption: There was nobody behind the counter, but we could hear the TV playing in the back room.

Panel 2: Medium shot of Laura, coming from the back room. A pale face with a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, hair in a bob with bangs, and thick-rimmed glasses that look out of place on a face this classically beautiful, in an old-fashioned way. She is wearing a thrift-store faux-fur coat and a dress with a lace collar.

Caption: She was pretty, but not in a California way . . . she had one of those faces that you find yourself staring at in wonder, like a painting that catches you in a gallery.

Panel 3: Counter-shot, Nick’s face with a wolfish grin on it.

Nick: Hiii . . .

Caption: He started in on her right away. I’d seen it before – this sudden shift in him, an alertness that came into him like a dog hunching its shoulders.

Caption: Suddenly so alert . . . it was hard to imagine that by dawn his blood and brains would be all over the cement floor of some lonely garage.

If that doesn't get the reader's attention, I'm not sure what will . . .

Cesar thumbnailed the scene out like this . . .

And from that, built these excellent pencils, which you can see after the jump . . .

Screen 3: From Script to Screen

This screen contains what is probably my favorite panel of these eight screens (although what I'm really looking forward to is beyond screen 8) -- the introductory close-up of Nick, framed against a starry country sky. Even the pencils are evocative, but I feel like the inks are perfect, and the use of color in the final panel is amazing.

First, the script.

Screen 3: Divided down the center, horizontally, into two panels. The first shows a high-angle shot of two men getting out of the car, both of them wearing tan barn coats and jeans. There is a real similarity to them, accentuated by this angle. The man on the driver’s side has slightly lighter hair.

Narrator (figure on driver’s side): I suppose we could just stay the night here.

Panel 2: Close-up of Nick’s face. It is a handsome, chiseled face, with an ugly expression on it of anger.

Nick: Since we’re lost and won’t make LA inside of five hours, why not?

SFX: ZZZZZzzzt!

Caption: I would just as soon have driven all night. The place was a dump, and I fully expected to see a cockroach making lazy circles in the sink in the room. But it was almost 1 in the morning, and I was practically falling asleep at the wheel.

Cesar roughs the panel out in this thumbnail:

The care that Cesar takes with the characters is amazing, especially in the panel 2 close-up:

But the inks are, on this panel, transformative:

At this point, we turned the screen over to Steven for lettering. here's the result, after the jump:

Screen 2: From Story to Script to Screen

For screen 2, I was basically using this chunk of the original text, plus some left-over images from earlier in the story:

We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to the 101 or the 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties and then ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side. I yanked the Bronco across the gravel and brought it to a stop in front of the office. OPEN  ALL  NITE the sign said. A bug light near the door buzzed blue, victimless. It was January, and there was an unseasonal freeze, a newsworthy one that plunged temperatures to near zero and turned the promise of California to a chill lie. We'd stopped talking, Nick and I, an hour ago. 


Which I converted to this screen in the script: 

Screen 2: A 70’s model Ford Bronco pulling into the parking lot. The place looks shabby – window-model air conditioners sticking out, one room window boarded up with plywood, shingles missing from the roof, trash in the parking lot, the burned out neon of the sign. The café’s lettering is half peeled off the window.
Caption: We’d been driving the back roads of the valley to LA, as an alternative to the 101 or the 5.
Caption: But I’d packed the wrong map, and now we were lost on country road that rolled forever past frostbitten fields and numbered gravel tracks.
Inset panel: A sign in the café window reads “Open All Nite.” We see an out-of focus figure wiping a counter, beyond.
Inset panel: A blue bug light over the office door.
SFX: ZZZZZZzzzzt!

Cesar thumbnailed it out this way:

 

And then worked from that to make his first pencils, which you can see after the jump -- only this time, he made one small mistake:

Completing the Team: Lettering Night at the Western

There always seems to be a debate going on on the comics boards -- a very partisan debate, between the different aspects of comics. The artists have a tendency to say that it's the art which is preeminent: without good art, a good story is worth nothing. The writers often hold the opposite view: without a good story, the art is just meaningless images.

Maybe it's the fact that I am such a huge fan of the visual arts, but I hold the view that both are important -- are, in fact, integral to one another and inseparable. To me, it hardly seems to be an argument worth having.

Both camps, however, forget the importance of that often-forgotten comics art: lettering. I've definitely seen some comics with excellent writing, great art and cringe-worthy lettering, both online and in print. Cesar and I were determined not to make this mistake, so we put an ad up at Penciljack for a letterer to join us in the Zudacomics gamble. And just as I got lucky finding Cesar, we got extraordinarily lucky when Steven from Fonografiks agreed to round out our team. A professional with years of experience under his belt, Steven was the final piece of the puzzle for us, designing a lettering style that fit perfectly with Night at the Western's style.

Cesar sent the inked first page along to Steven for a test, and this was the result:

 

Clearly, we had a winning combination. And to see how it all came together in the end, stop by Zuda and take a look at the completed screen. While you are there, CAST YOUR VOTE for us so we can keep telling this story . . .

Screen 1: From Script to Screen

I couldn't possibly find a better artist than Cesar for bringing my words to life. Cesar's not only a talented artist with a style that suits my vision perfectly; he's an attentive reader of the script, and brings every detail to life. I try to build room for the artist to innovate into the script: I want to be exact about how I see things, but not tell them everything. Cesar uses this room perfectly, "getting" where I want to go with a panel, but innovating as well.

Script to Thumbnail:

Here's the script for Screen 1 again. Let's watch Cesar take these words from thumbnail sketch to pencils to inks.

Night at the Western

For zudacomics

Words: Ray Nayler

Images: César Sebastian Diaz

Lettering: Fonografiks

All gutters and trim full black where panels are not full bleed. Colors are muted, dark, a focus on reds, browns, oranges and the occasional blue.

Screen  1: Night. Splash full-bleed full-color of the Western Motel sign: a neon sign shaped like a cartoony cactus with half of its letters burnt out announcing the W STE N   OTEL and  ACANCY in cursive below.  Post-card-like insets in sepia-tone show different views of the Motel  in better days.

Post card 1: an L-shape of rooms with and office at the left, long end of the L and a detached café. Sleek 40’s cars lined up in front of the rooms.

Post card 2: A pump-jockey in a paper cap filling the tank on a bulletnose Ford with a big grin on his face.

Post card 3: A man in a car coat leaning against the café counter, dinking a coffee and laughing while the waitress leans across, taking his order. Behind them, “Western Motel Café” is painted across the window in 50’s script (backwards from this angle).

Caption: It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps on an island between the office and the coffee shop.

Caption: The Bronco’s gas gauge was below the red line and the little yellow E on the dashboard said it was stop now where we could maybe get the tank filled and a cup of coffee . . .

Caption: or stop later on the side of some lonely country road.

Here's Cesar's thumbnail sketch of what I'm going for:

 

 Thumbnail to Pencil:

Which he uses to develop this amazing penciled screen:

  

 I didn't see the thumbnail until we decided to put this page together for you -- Cesar would just send me the finished pencil so that I could proof it before he inked it. Since he nails the mood I'm going for here, and the details (with a few minor differences I would not quibble over -- see if you can catch them), I gave him the thumbs-up, and he went ahead and inked screen 1, the results of which you can see after the jump:

Screen 1: From Story to Script

In the first entry, I gave you a look at a part of the original story that Night at the Western comes from. In this entry, I want to show you how I converted the story to the script.

The script for panel 1 basically covers this chunk of the original story:

The motel was a small dim island of light. Coming over a little hill, we saw it slanting along one side of the road. A neon sign shaped like a cactus announced it with burnt out and flickering letters as the WE_TERN MO_E_. Lights were on in the office, and in a little coffee-shop in the gravel parking lot. There was a sick old Oak at the opposite end of the strip of rooms, leaning over the furthest room from the office like a reproachful parent. Two near identical cars in the parking lot near the coffee-shop sat with rust eating their metal, frost and bald tires sagging. The road went on slightly downhill and straight, through a countryside as empty as the motel.
It was the Coke machine that made us stop, and a lonely set of gas pumps, the ancient bubble-head kind, between the office and the coffee-shop. The gas gauge on the Bronco had dipped below the red line, and was approaching the little yellow E on the dashboard. We'd been driving the back roads through the valley to L.A. I had suggested taking the back roads as an interesting alternative to the 101 or the 5. I'd also packed the wrong map, and driven this straight country road, passing the numbered gravel tracks on either side (too lonely for names) until they had approached the forties and then ended abruptly, leaving only the empty straight blacktop and the frostbit fields on either side.

Luckily, I've got a pretty visual style to begin with, so it isn't as difficult to convert things as it could be if I was a different type of writer. Still, the way you tell a short story with words, and the way you tell it with words and images together, need to be entirely different. I wanted to make sure that I was using the strengths of both modes of expression. Something I'm particularly careful about as a writer is using the form well: I don't want to do it with words if I can do it with images, and I certainly don't want the two to overlap.

Here's the original script page I came up with for Panel 1, after the jump.

The Beginning: The Original Short Story

Welcome to all of our fans and fellow Zudites! We thought it would be interesting for you to see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes work that went into the development of Night at the Western.

This is a journey that actually started a long time ago, when I was 19 years old and living in a Victorian-era studio apartment above a liquor store in San Jose, attending Foothill Junior College, working full time, and struggling to get my first short stories published. I penned the short story version of Night at the Western in a tiny breakfast nook I had converted to a writing room, sitting in front of a window overlooking a criminal stretch of The Alameda, with a view of a pay phone that hookers used to contact their drug dealers and johns. I was poor, overworked, and almost completely free: in short, it was the perfect time and place to compose crime stories, and that's what I began to do. I wove my own experiences traveling across the country by train and car together with the Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson novels that I had been reading ravenously in-between my classes and my job at a bookstore. The result was A Night at the Western and a handful of other dark tales. They all had different fates: some were scooped up by publishers of small magazines, others never saw the light. Meanwhile I had moved to foggy Santa Cruz and completed a degree in Literature and kept writing, publishing my first novel, American Graveyards, in 2001.

Cut to the present day: after a decade of traveling and working in a number of different professions, as well as continuing to write, I decided to try my hand at a genre that I've loved since I was a kid: the comic book. I'm not ashamed to call them comic books or comics: it's better if we don't get too fancy. I prefer the word "movies" to the word "cinema" and I think all of that highbrow language is just a way to divide people.

Looking for material of my own that I could convert into comics, I began with another story, "The Ride," and started looking for an artist with a style that suited the subject matter. I found the amazing artist Cesar Sebastian Diaz via the boards at Penciljack, and we set to work. Cesar suggested trying to compete at Zuda Comics. I had already finished "The Ride" and the script was far too short, so I began converting "A Night at the Western," probably one of my personal favorites. We teamed up later with Steven Finch from Fonografiks who lent some fantastic lettering skills to the project and rounded out our team.

And so here we are in Zuda's March competition. This blog will be about showing you how we got here as well as how things are going now, so I guess I better start from the beginning -- the original story that I turned into the Night at the Western script. Here it is after the jump -- or at least the portion of it that became these first eight panels -- there's lots more, but if you want to see how it all ends, you'll have to vote for us!