Panel Descriptions
Here's an issue that I have been hitting a lot and I hope that someone might have answers for me and that is panel descriptions. And not just about establishing shots or anything, I mean you have your description document of characters, you've established a settting, but say your in a fight scene and you write something like this:
"Good guy palm heels bad guy in the forehead with his right hand."
I feel like thats a panel in itself, I feel like I've described the panel sufficiently and now I can move on. But am I wrong and if so what am I missing in the panel? If the artist wants to add something, cool, but I feel like I dropped the basic idea down and as long as that is shown, I'm happy. I mean obviously background needs to be there, I can't deal with Mike Mignola style, but I feel like if I establish the setting in the first panel or something, I don't have to keep on describing the background.
The same thing with lets say two people talking and walking down a street or something. If I establish where the two characters are in the 1st panel, I feel like I can do something like this:
"Sam and Max walk down the sidewalk. Sam has an agitated look on his face, while Max has a slight smirk on his"
Then you fill in with whatever dialogue needs to be inserted. But am I wrong about this, again I feel like the main idea of the panel is being described and I want to leave the rest to the artist to handle the details that may be unimportant to me as the writer in the sense that if you want to show other people walking, cool. If not, that's fine too, I'm fine with whatever as long as the expressions are shown and the dialogue is being shown.
But am I just being lazy or trying too hard to be Warren Ellis or something?
"Good guy palm heels bad guy in the forehead with his right hand."
I feel like thats a panel in itself, I feel like I've described the panel sufficiently and now I can move on. But am I wrong and if so what am I missing in the panel? If the artist wants to add something, cool, but I feel like I dropped the basic idea down and as long as that is shown, I'm happy. I mean obviously background needs to be there, I can't deal with Mike Mignola style, but I feel like if I establish the setting in the first panel or something, I don't have to keep on describing the background.
The same thing with lets say two people talking and walking down a street or something. If I establish where the two characters are in the 1st panel, I feel like I can do something like this:
"Sam and Max walk down the sidewalk. Sam has an agitated look on his face, while Max has a slight smirk on his"
Then you fill in with whatever dialogue needs to be inserted. But am I wrong about this, again I feel like the main idea of the panel is being described and I want to leave the rest to the artist to handle the details that may be unimportant to me as the writer in the sense that if you want to show other people walking, cool. If not, that's fine too, I'm fine with whatever as long as the expressions are shown and the dialogue is being shown.
But am I just being lazy or trying too hard to be Warren Ellis or something?
Comments
I dealt with a script once that was so dense with (to my mind) unneeded scene descriptions (locations of unused doors etc) that I spent considerable time deleting the excess before I printed it out, just so I could see the forest for the trees.
But the writer found it necessary to include all of that, I guess, because it helped him to understand the story. To each his own.
How much to write depends a lot on the artist. As an extreme example, Stan Lee could get away with writing essentially nothing in term of panel descriptions or (until afterward) dialog, because he was usually giving it to Jack Kirby, who he could trust and who thrived on that amount of creative freedom. If I'm scripting for myself, I'll write uselessly brief descriptions ("Jason grins. Trevor scowls.")
But if I'm writing for an Artist To Be Identified Later (or one who I thing might need coaching), I'll tend to err on the side of Moore, to make sure they're thinking about what else is happening in the setting (e.g. "the crowd is watching in horror"), or specifying distance and panel sizes to prevent sameness. However when I do that, I make a point of encouraging the Artist When Later Identified to do it differently if he has a better idea (which the good ones often do).
http://www.blambot.com/comicscript.shtml
Panel 1. DREDD on his bike.
Panel 2. Wide. We're looking over the top of DREDD'S head as he sits on the outskirt of a riot.
(For me, learning was a combo of COME IN ALONE and the Dark Horse submission guideline script.)
Page8 line 3, change the spelling to weird.
That said, I have a macro set up in Word that takes care of about 90% of the formatting headaches for letterers. The two things that still cause me issues are indenting dialogue by using a hard return and a tab, and PDF scripts.
approximation of how the text
might fit in a word balloon.
(Note: I'm not going to start doing this.)
Real talk: do any of you ever paste in images in your scripts as part of your panel description? I'll occasionally throw a specific outfit or a quickly-doodled panel layout or something in there to supplement the panel description.
The most recent one I did is, I've got a gag where I wanted to add a statue to Adam Yauch Memorial Park, so I dug up a picture of...y'all remember that giant gold statue of Superman they put up in the comics after his death? So I'm basically telling the artist "this, but it's Fight for Your Right Yauch and he's got a mic in his fist".
e. I still keep the characters' names all caps, for whatever reason. For me, it's slightly easier to pick out who's where on a page that way. *shrug*