About "Deep Blue"

Deep Blue is my first attempt at writing and publishing a graphic novel. It concerns the adventures of Marlya Silverscales, a mermaid who unknowingly carries with her the secret to an ancient magical artifact that would allow the user to conquer the World (like all powerful ancient magical artifacts in literature).

Deep Blue is created through a dementedly-complex, byzantine process involving a large number of software applications that I either had at hand or was able to find freeware for (OK, I’m cheap). Generally, my method for creating a page is:

1. Come up with the next part of the plot in my head, using “Mind” freeware. I could really use an upgrade for this app, by the way; my version is buggy.

2. Write the script. I use Celtx 2.7, a freeware script-writing application.

3. Create poses for each of the characters in the page frames using Poser 5 They’re now up to Version 8.

4. Go into my studio “back lot” in OpenSimulator, using a viewer such as Hippo or Imprudence. OpenSimulator is an open-source implementation of the virtual world Second Life® server software. I run it as a private simulator on my own machine. I have on occasion done “location shoots” in Second Life itself. I import any textures, shapes, and poses I need.

5. The pose animation files are put into “poseballs” – objects that the actor avatars “sit” on which then run the desired animation (in this case, one-frame static pose anims). Poseballs are standard in Second Life; I created my own version which allows me to load in a number of animations and then control any or all of them during the shoot by chat channel commands.

6. Build the sets and props needed for the scene in my OpenSim world. This can involve textures either found, photographed or created with Adobe Photoshop, as well as occasional shapes created with Blender.

7. Bring in my avatar actor(s) using multiple instances of Hippo, Imprudence, and Metabolt , a lightweight non-graphical viewer that doesn’t take as much memory or other resources at the cost of reduced abilities. These I run on another PC on my LAN because things really get bogged down if I try to run everything on one machine at once. I position the actors in the scene on the poseballs which I move and rotate until everyone is in their places for the shoot.

8. Adjust the lighting by choosing an environmental lighting scheme, and moving the Sun (or Moon) and any light sources in the scene.

9. Shoot each frame for the page with the Snapshot function in the viewer. I generally take several shots of each frame using different angles, character expressions, and so on. I try to shoot at a good resolution; usually 2200 x 1590, although I use even more pixels for full-page frames. The goal is 300 DPI on the page in case I ever get this thing published professionally.

10. Send everybody home and shut down the world.

11. Select the images to be used for each frame in the page, and note them in the script.

12. I build the page using Photoshop, starting with a page template that has guide lines for placement of the frames. I have predefined styles for frame borders, speech balloons and so on, which speeds things up.

13. Save the finished page as a Photoshop .psd file, and as a full sized .jpg (again, in case I ever get published) and also as a webpage-sized .jpg.

That’s just to create the comic page itself. Now I have to put it on this site.  That's not quite as difficult, but requires an FTP client; Filezilla in my case.