9/29/2015 Skubit Comics Blog: An Electricomic with Formal Constraints: The Arcane

http://blog.skubit.com/2015/09/anelectricomicwithformalconstraints.html 1/4

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Sunday, September 27, 2015

An Electricomic with Formal Constraints: The Arcane

Here I present the method I used for transitioning the first part of The Arcane digital comic into an electricomic. I'm following in the tradition of Oubapo in providing additional formal constraints, which may not be clear onfirst glance.

Step 1:This is the comic title. The text has four lines, each getting progressively larger according to the fibonaccisequence. In this case, the sequence of growth is 1-1-2-3. So the first two lines are the same font size.

Step 2:This is the iris shot. These were employed in silent films. When the film ended, the circle (or the camera lens)would close. In this case, we are opening the scene with the iris. Also notice the Sepia tone on the frame. Thiswas a common technique of tinting black-and-white films; and in this case, I used it to give the comic an olderfeel.

Step 3:This is an inter-title, also commonly used in silent films. Notice that the sequence on size is now 1-2-3-5. We'vedropped the first number from the fibonacci sequence. This will be a common pattern on inter-titles as the nextone will start at 2-3 and so on.

Inter-titles are important since we are operating within certain formal constraints. Some panels prove to beunusable under these constraints so inter-titles help fill in the story gaps.

Step 4:Here is a standard box-letter frame giving some sense of tension that something is about to happen. I could havetaken a wider view, but I wanted it to still have the feel of an old film in single panel frames.

Shane Isbell

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9/29/2015 Skubit Comics Blog: An Electricomic with Formal Constraints: The Arcane

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Step 5-6:Speech balloons give a sense of time passing, with balloons at the top of the frame occurring before balloonsbelow it. In this case I wanted to just show the half of the scene which is spoken first: the right-half.  This goesagainst natural reading order but makes temporal sense. When the user clicks, the left side of the panel appears,with the cowboy's response.

Step 7-9:This panel scene is divided into three panels, flowing from left to right. You may have noticed that the first panelonly shows the speech balloon, not the speaker. The panel below is to the far left.

The reason this is done is because I'm following the fibonacci sequence of 1-1-2 on breaking the panel, whichmeans a division of 25%, 25%, 50%. If you recall, in Step 5, the panel is divided in half, which is sequence 1-1 or50%, 50%.

Point: Notice that the panels sizes are also following a fibonacci sequence. The iris shot is single panel (step 2).This is followed by the initial base scene (step 4), also single panel. And then we have 2 panels (step 5-6) andthen 3 panels (step 7-9). This is the sequence 1-1-2-3, which we will follow throughout the comic.

Step 10:We are now beginning a new sequence of panels. Like step 2, we are again showing the town but this time somestrangers are in the distance.

Step 11:Again an inter-title after the first panel in the sequence. This time we are starting the size of the fonts as 1-2,increasing the size on each line.

Step 12:One panel

Step 13-14:The coloring on this was a bit of an accident. I had been using the Sepia feature on Fireworks but as a short-cut Idecided to do it through Mac Preview and the color wasn't as washed out as the other panels. I decided to leavethis in, as many silent films are spliced together from multiple sources and may be of different tints. But again,you see the 50/50 split of the two panel frame. We are going left-to-right to follow the flow of the speechballoons.

9/29/2015 Skubit Comics Blog: An Electricomic with Formal Constraints: The Arcane

http://blog.skubit.com/2015/09/anelectricomicwithformalconstraints.html 3/4

Posted by Shane Isbell at 1:33 PM

Step 15-17This construction was also an accident, as I didn't have the CSS values correct but I liked the sense of tension asthe panels got progressively larger. We have the 25/25/50 panel sequence of 1-1-2 horizontally. Interestingly, itfollows the same sequence vertically.

Step 18:This is the 3rd fibonacci sequence (act 3) of the story. It starts with a scene of the strangers in the saloon.

Step 19:Inter-title, starting with size sequence of 3-5-8. Since this is the 4th title/inter-title, we've dropped the first 3numbers in the fibonacci sequence. This constraint forces us to minimize the use of inter-titles, otherwise theywill get too large for the screen.

Step 24-26:I won't go into the all of the rest of the panels, as I think it's clear what the constraints are. I do want to point outthat steps 24-26 are a bit different, as the flow is left panel, right panel and then middle panel. I did this becausethe middle panel is farther in the distance, so I wanted it to remain more mysterious until the last. Technically,this breaks the ordering of the sequence into 1-2-1.

ResourcesThe elcx file is located at

https://github.com/skubit/thearcane-electricomic/blob/master/arcane.elcxproject/TheArcane.elcx

The YouTube video showing the electricomic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHdG3lWCd8c

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