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:

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Night at the Western Makes Headlines in Spain

Check out this review in Entrecomics! I can't read it, but maybe Cesar can give us a translation! Night at the Western has the most worldwide team ever to compete at Zudacomics -- an artist in Spain, a writer in Tajikistan, and a letterer in the UK.

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.