Comic Adaption Practice Progress: Referencing, Adapting and Roughs

With the announcement of a new Star Wars movie being released in December this year, I was slowly getting into the Star wars mood. This helped me motive myself when creating practical work. To explore where I was with producing comics, I decided to start a test where I would take a scene from a screenplay that did not make it into the final film as a way to see how I can adapt a form of literacy into a visual format.

This collection of images was from one of the deleted scenes from one of the Star Wars prequels where we get to see Padme's parents. I found it to be quite interesting because the get to see more of Padme's characters in it. To me, it was like a high school girl bringing her boyfriend for dinner. Sadly it was never used because it didn't really assist the plot in any way and that the certain things which were established were already addressed in later scene. I was planning to recreate this scene as a comic page but instead I decided to make it into a single panel. 

Here are a few sketches of how I could draw the characters in the deleted scene.

Deleted Scene Characters

Screenplay Line adapted in sketch

Rendered Test

Coloured and rendered test with speech bubbles with the Komika text font.

The flow in this panel was quite poor because I was trying to follow the source material in regards to staging and camera shots. I feel that it would be more suited if it flowed from left to right in a western comic style. Furthermore speech bubble placement is one of my weakest areas when making comics.

Original Rendered Panel

Original rendered panel with flow

However as you can see here I have some changes to correct the flow. I made another attempt at this media test. This time, I took another scene from the film and recreated it in the form of a comic. I wanted to visualize a scene from the film that never made it to the final cut. I took a look at the Art of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and found out it actually had a screenplay by George Lucas and Johnathan Hales. I noticed in some sections of the story, there were scenes that were not the original film nor the deleted scenes on the DVD. However I understand that the prequels are very flawed in acting performance and script writing. Nevertheless I I still think Its worth exploring and hopefully this test will allow me to give a little bit of character to many of these character  who were portrayed poorly in the films.

Mood board featuring screenshots from Star Wars Episode 2

Rough Sketches

Page 1

Page 2

Rough drawings of the scene

I found this practical exercise to be quite a challenging because I had some problems with keeping the style consistent including the consistent placement of objects. I kept this restricted to 2 pages.

References

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. 2002. [DVD] Lucasfilm Ltd: George Lucas.

Vaz, M.C., Lucas, G. and Hales, J. 2002. The Art of Star Wars, Episode II, Attack of the Clones. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group.