Episode 707 - Fight Choreography
Sep 30, 2024
Fight choreography is tricky. We have it in comics, plays, movies and TV. When it's in full motion the trick is that you cant usually show things connecting so you have to work around the safety aspects in various ways. In comics you can show things connecting but how do you make the movement and the narrative believable and exciting just by using still images? It takes a lot of skill! Animation has to be the easiest way to depict fights because you can show the results of hits AND you can easily make moment believable but there are always challenges.
Topics and Show Notes
There are 3 main types of fights: duels, brawls, and battles, though there are a million combos and variations between those. Duel: one against one. Brawl: everyone against everyone. Battle: a big group against another big group. Fights usually involve a character that wants something and another trying to prevent them from getting it so the narrative of your fight has to include that dynamic, not simply action for its own sake.
I've worked at drawing a few fight scenes myself for my comics and I think I do a pretty decent job at it. I visualise the fight progress in my mind, work out the beginning, middle and end of it (treating it like a mini story), and then visualise cool images that depict parts of the progress and action in the most dynamic and sexily interesting way possible. That works well for duels. Battles are more chaotic and it helps just to focus on a few key parts while leaving the main fighting in the background. Trying to show the overall clash on a larger scale is very easy to mess up: look at the stupid battles in the later Lord of the Rings movies, the troop moments make no sense at all, they're just running from here to there to everywhere pretty pointlessly, but when things focus down on individuals at a smaller scale it works much better!
What are your fave fight scenes? And how do you go about choreographing a fight in your comic? One of my faves is the duel between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride and the first fight in the movie the Duellists.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Cork and Blotto - Hill street bluesish 80s sounding TV drama action theme mixed with a holly reverential choir. Tasty, spiky red hot lashings of electric guitar splashed thoroughly through it, counterbalancing the more thoughtful and staid piano.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Shiortsighted - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/sep/24/featured-comic-shiortsighted/
Featured music:
Cork and Blotto - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Cork_and_Blotto/ - by Stever_Blotto, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 703 - Cross Cultural Influence
Sep 2, 2024
Cross cultural influence is a marvellous thing and very enriching to creativity! It's lovely when you can see multiple cultural influences in things, whether comics, movies, art, fashion, music or anything else. It's inspiring and leads to new and more interesting things. I picked promo images from some recent Pixar movies Turning Red, Encanto, Coco, and Moana, because they're good examples of the process and what it can result in.
Episode 701 - Faces come out in the rain...
Aug 19, 2024
Drawing faces is one of the most natural things for us to do, and they're very easy for people to see that they're faces because animals are evolved especially to be able to see faces- people mistakenly think this is just a human thing but it's clearly something that happened much earlier. We're so good at seeing faces we see them where they don't exist (paradolia). So drawing them for comics should be super simple, should it? Well it is and it isn't.
Episode 695 - Pop Culture
Jul 7, 2024
Pop Culture, and the way it's always changing… We fall in love with pop culture but it's constantly changing and new pop culture is always being created, which means that as time goes on less and less people will care about the same pop culture as you. And what you were into will become niche and obscure, even though at the time you fell in love with it, it was massively mainstream and all over the place! There are exceptions to this with things that are SUPER popular like Star Wars, DC and Marvel comic characters, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, who's new versions facilitate a life support for the old stuff or sometimes even a revival of it, but they also have an issue where they try and replace their classic stuff with the newer versions.
Episode 693 - Betray!
Jun 24, 2024
Betrayal is not a fave theme of mine in any media. I really dislike it, but it's so popular! We've talked about this one before but no one really remembers Quackcast 427 so we're having another crack at it! We talk about all the different aspects: political, love, country, loyalty etc and really have fun with it!
Episode 680 - Intelligence in Fiction
Mar 25, 2024
Today we're talking about the depiction of “intelligence” in fiction! There are a lot of ways this shows up: the genius detective who can understand any clue and uncover any lie, the amazing doctor who can understand any disease, the computer nerd who can do ANYTHING with computers, the genius savant with Asperger's, the crafty serial killer with plans within plans…
Episode 674 - Fashion
Feb 12, 2024
Do you change your style to go with current fashions or do you stick with your own thing and stay independent of changing trends? This is complicated by the fact that most people's styles are often influenced by an earlier fashion they just stuck with, but certainly not always, and some fashions reach a point where they become fully developed and eternal (like Art Deco), so it's worth sticking with those rather than changing to reflect ephemeral trends that are never properly formed.
Episode 671 - Art Vs the Artist
Jan 22, 2024
Art VS the artist! Can you infer something about the creator from their creation? Do you think the art is an accurate reflection of the artist?
