Episode 284 - Writing Dialogue pt2
Aug 15, 2016
Well this is the SECOND part of our Quackcast on Dialogue! As with last week, this Quackcast is based on a thread in the DD forums discussing different approaches to creating Dialogue in webcomics. This time we have an additional guest though: the mighty Pitface joins, Tantz, Banes and I once more. We have a dialogue on dialogue, natter away and speak in different accents. We also tried using Google Hangouts for this Quackcast instead of Skype for once just to see if that made things any clearer… It did a little. Google Hangouts had it's own non-intuitive issues that we had to work through, but in many, many ways it worked better than Skype! Gunwallace's musical theme was Our little mental hospital. a crazy insane sounding Latin groove. Makes you want to salsa!
Topics and Show Notes
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Cosmos Song - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Cosmos_Song/
Links
Writing Dialogue thread - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/forum/topic/177537/
Bravo - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/bravo1102/
Genejoke - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Genejoke/
Usedbooks - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/usedbooks/
Ozoneocean - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean/
Toondoctor - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/toondoctor/
Gunwallace - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Irrevenant - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/irrevenant/
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Banes - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
Tantz Areine - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Without_Moonlight/
Pitface - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/PIT_FACE/
Featured music:
Our little mental hospital - http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Our_Little_Mental_Hospital/, by tim_in_a_box, rated E.
Episode 283 - Writing Dialogue pt1
Aug 8, 2016
Dialogue is a key part of any comic, it pushes the story along, keys the reader in on things that would be otherwise ambiguous, hints and foreshadows at future happenings, creates humour… well, it's just a big part of comics, that's all! And that's what we're chatting about here in this Quackcast! The topic stems from a forum thread I posted a while ago asking people about their approach to creating dialogue and how people go about it; is it heavily scripted in advance or is it one of the last things you come up with? People had some very interesting responses! Gunwallace's musical theme was Magical Misfits. The sound is magical, classical, threatening, yet full of adventure! Love those creeping cellos, the violin and clarinet sound like a humorous dialogue between the wittier members of the party.
Episode 279 - Meet the Mutants!
Jul 11, 2016
Our very own heavily mutated Pitface put up a guest post about her fellow mutants, filling in for HippieVan while Hippy is away fighting the mutants in Japan wearing a tie-dyed sailor suit and riding a Volkswagen battle mecha, as you do in Japan… anyway, as a member of the anti-mutant police force, I had to drag in Pit for questioning! And that's what we did for this Quackcast. Banes and I interrogate Pit on the subject of mutants! Mutants are a forgotten race at the moment: Mutants are the zombies of SciFi in a way; a mob of anonymous monstrous minions who exist to menace the heroes and be gunned down in their thousands. But they're also so much more… Unlike zombies, mutants have a lot more personality and humanity, they can also be far more demonic and revolting than any zombie, they can be any shape, size of configuration. Mutants are so much scarier and adaptable than mere zombies, because unlike zombies they're not always degrading and falling apart, no, mutants are evolving constantly, they can get larger, gorier and more terrifying, i.e. The Thing. For mutant pathos witness the Mars mutants in the original Total Recall: There's a man with a baby in his chest and we feel for him and respect him. We have superhero mutants too in the form of the X-men. Can't forget them! But remember also that “mutants” are also a very real thing in this world, unlike zombies, in fact we are ALL mutants in one way or another, not just those special people with a conjoined twin or extra nipples or genitals or whatever, all of us have our own exciting DNA variation! I have a big nose, crooked lower teeth and pasty white skin myself, I'm practically a Morlock. So what is YOUR “mutation”?
Episode 278 - Maturity and the whisper game
Jul 4, 2016
Quackcast 278 is a strange bird! We have TWO things in it! TWO! Not one… but TWO. First we play the whisper game, inspired by Ms Pitface. So what we did was one of us said something into the camera with the sound down and then everyone else had to guess what we said. Out of all of us Banes was he best. I got ONE right, but as a general rule I was the worst at it. Pit and Tantz were ok… The fun of it was the silly guesses though. It's a great parlour game for your drawing room. The second part is where we talk about MATURITY. Banes has finally become a man and he shows it by dominating us all. The guy's a beast! Seriously though, there are some interesting lessons about being “mature”… it's not all about that quote “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”.. no, this is more about how you deal with other people, not how you present yourself and what you do with your free time. Plenty of adults don't play with “childish things” but they're less mature than most toddlers. It's an interesting subject! Gunwallace's theme for Bruno Harm is an appropriate Rockford files style intro for a guy who thinks he’s Peter Gunn. Added comedy lines featuring Banes and me!
Episode 276 - Time management, Deadlines and Organisation
Jun 20, 2016
For Quackcast 276 we had a discussion about the topics of time management, organisation and deadlines- all things essential to the practitioners of webcomics, and even more-so to people involved in webcomic collaborations! This is tricky stuff to handle, you have to balance your webcomicing with your other life activities as well as audience expectation for updates! And as you go on it gets harder and harder to stick with self imposed deadlines, so how do you combat that? Well one way is to make a Patreon account so people will put money towards you updating, That can make an excellent incentive to stick to a deadline, when there's money involved! Collaborations can be easy or hard to keep alive, as long as everyone is equally eager to take part and everyone wants it to succeed then you're good, if not then your group project needs a good leader: not someone who WANTS to be a leader, rather someone who's dedicated to getting the project DONE and needs to be the leader to make that happened, sort of like my role at Drunk Duck. They need to be willing and able to coordinate people and tell them what to do, handle their strengths and weaknesses right to get the work done. The last part to remember is contingencies for when things go wrong! What are your safeguards? i.e. buffers, finishing early so you've got extra time to work on the project if it needs it, have backup people lined up to do work for you, filler art at the ready, guest strips, maybe even simplified techniques or just posting line art instead. How do YOU stick to deadlines (if you do), how do you handle time management and organisation with your comics and collaborators? Gunwallace's theme music this week was Z74's Star Knights. It's An operatic swarm of hornets on a massed bombing run over enemy territory.
Episode 272 - DD electric people, community meetup
May 22, 2016
State your business! Venerable Drunkducker Ayesinback suggested we have an open electronic meetup of DD people, so that's exactly what we did! We all met up in a long Skype session that lasted 10 hours- various DDers dropped in and out over that time and we chatted away about everything and nothing on videochat, meanwhile I tried on a never ending series of antique and novelty hats, one after another… It was really lovely to see old and new DDers all together, to see their faces and hear their voices. A big thankyou to everyone who took part! It was a big success! We will try it again and again in the coming months. The proposed date is the 3rd Saturday of every month, so the next one will be the 18th of June. The session starts at 11am New York time and runs for 10 hours until 9 pm New York time, so you can drop in any time during that! You can get Skype for free here: www.skype.com. It works on all computers, phones and tablets. It can even work just in your web browser alone! You just sign up and install it. Then make sure you add “ozoneocean” as a friend. Gunwallace's track this week was for Darklings. It's nice and long one with a good progressive rhythm. Some of the genius things we discussed: The measure of distance is time. Inbreeding leads to contagious genetic deformity. Direct democracy VS Harkovast. We beet the sugar! Pineapple and artichoke, why eat them?
Episode 271 - Pitface’s tales of ribaldry
May 15, 2016
What makes the “meat” of a story? What makes you fall in love with it, keep coming back for more watches or reads or whatever? I contend it has nothing to do with conflict or culminations or climaxes, those are merely generic structural plottings that are pretty much the same format no matter what story you read- you know they're coming and you know what form they'll take and once they're over it's not really that significant anymore; “re-playability” is low, they're just too tied in with the story structure to have much life away from it in your mind. What keeps me coming back to a story and fall in love with it are the Characters, exploring the world in which they exist, and the development that occurs during the story. Gunwallace provides us a theme to CTV Revamped, the new version of Charby the Vampirate! Good and creepy techno for Charbs!
Episode 270 - Historical Accuracy Vs Story Needs part 2
May 9, 2016
We return to the topic of historical accuracy versus the needs the the story. This was Bravo's idea and we wanted to have him along but alas it was not to be! Tantz Aerine, Pitface, Banes and I discuss the topic, reading from a few of the many contributions in the form thread that Bravo started. Special congratulations to Pitface who's just graduated with honours with her BA in classics! -So you she really does KNOW what she's talking about… as does Tantz too of course. Banes and I are just along for the ride. Gunwallace gave us a really pretty tune for the comic Torn Vines, a real action music, such a driving rhythm to it!