Sunday 31 July 2011

Retrospective "colour scripts"!!

I was recently reading Hans Bacher's Book "Dream Worlds" again, specifically a section on colour scripts. I first came across this idea in John Culhane's book on the making of Disney's Aladdin, where there's a photo of the colour script for the entire movie which consists very tiny frames that show no detail but the dominant colours of each scene in a continuity so the feel of each scene can be assessed together with those that both precede and follow it. I don't think anyone really has time to do this in comics but I try and think that way when I'm colouring my own work and when colouring other people's.
This all made me wonder if one could do a retrospective colour script to see if there is a feel of change between scenes, so I shrunk down a couple of stories and mosaic-ed that art to see if the changes of scene would still read. Below are a couple of Judge Dredd stories the first episode of Ratfink and the one off story "The Pusher". Haven't quite decide what I think yet!












I'm currently recolouring Frank Quitely's work for the Flex Mentallo collection and these ideas are particularly appropriate as the story chops and changes between locations and I feel that one of my responsibilities is to make sure that there is a distinct feel of location and atmosphere to each scene so the reader knows that panels separated sometimes by several pages are actually part of the same scene.