So here's some stuff to explain what I'm doing for project 2. First off, I'm doing a book trailer for the first Sandman graphic novel by Neil Gaiman. I chose this mostly because of Dave Mckean's awesome art and design work for the series (the series itself is of course legendary in the world of graphic novels so, needless to say, the story is pretty awesome too). I've always wanted to do something that was remnant of McKean's style because he's pretty much my all time favorite artist/illustrator/graphic designer. I would love to have someone narrate the passage I chose (from the last chapter in the novel, The Sound of Her Wings) but finding someone who could do a good enough job of it would be damn near impossible because I'm picky like that. Instead I get to do it typographically which is actually just more fun for me anyway. I wanted to do something similar to Mckean's typography in the movie MirrorMask [I just watched that trailer for the first time to get that link...it's pretty terrible and kinda makes me wish I chose to redo it for this project - I guess I'll just have to save that for a personal project...anyway, moving on]. So I tried a little experiment and here's what I came out with:
To be honest, I really didn't think it would come out this good when I was rubber cementing waxed paper to a piece of cardboard and sloshing on black paint, but when it dried and I scratched in the letters, I was somewhat impressed. I was even happier after I scanned it and my scanner, which is notorious for destroying the look of anything I feed it, actually picked up the paint strokes and made it look extra awesome. Though it's not really what I was initially aiming for, it's exactly what I want.
I plan on using a lot of layers for this video. I want to have some indistinct backgroundy video stuff going on with some blurry/shadowy representation of two figures walking together and then slap the type over top. This is a very rough sketch of what I mean:
Since the story talks about wings, I want to include some rotoscoped footage of crows flying around (ps: this chapter is a conversation between Dream and his sister, Death; thus the use of crows). To transition between scenes, I want to have 3d layers of comics just kind of floating around and then zoom into them as the scenes change. This part of MirrorMask (starting at 0:24) inspired the idea (if you look close, the black lines and boxes that are kind of floating around are actually minimalist representations of comic frames and speech bubbles):
The quality of that youtube clip is so very terrible and I hope that if you're at all interested in watching the movie, you will at the very least download a good copy. The visuals are definitely the best part since there's a lot that doesn't make sense (though it's intentional, some people don't like that about it - I think it's pretty genius, but it took me a few watches to come to that conclusion) and the acting is kinda mediocre at best...but visually, it's just so imaginative and there are so many details that after watching it a thousand times, I still notice new things. Also, the opening credits are brilliant:
Anyway, that's kinda off topic, so lets move on.
The chapter focuses on the deaths of three people (an old violinist, a young female comedian, and a baby) so the main visuals will focus on some representation of these people.
I guess the only thing left at this point is the transcript for the text I will be including. I went through the chapter and grabbed the text from the thought boxes of the main character (Morpheus/Dream/Sandman...he goes by a lot of names). I wanted to use this text over the characters' actual dialog since it makes sense out of context and it's just really intriguing. So I'll end with that:
Soundless, we travel. No heads turn to mark our passing.
The churning crowd parts as we walk through it, looking everywhere else, but not at us.
In the world of the waking, of the living, we move as silent as a breath of cool wind.
As we pass them, people shiver and look away, mutter to each other.
“Feels like someone walking over my grave,” I heard one man say.
“Like someone just walked over my grave.”
Violin music echoes down the stairwell, sounding frail and out of place. I recognise the tune, although it is being played very badly.
I heard it last in London, two hundred years ago.
