MASTER CLASS at Center Stage Gallery
My artistic spirit guide Will Eisner once said(or so I heard in a Frank Miller interview) that "the writer and the artist must collaborate as closely as possible--if possible sharing the same body.” And while in most professional situations, writer and artists don’t actually share the same body, they do share the same body of work. Regardless which side we’re coming from, we ALL are on the same journey to grow in our ability to tell a story, and to do it with pictures. That is why I like to call what we do visual/storytelling (yes, with the weird forward dash in it).
So we’ll talk about many aspects of visual/storytelling: like film language, comic book sequential art, and what one can borrow from the other in terms of clarity and effectiveness to communicate with a large modern audience.
We’ll talk about the composition and meaning of an image. We'll talk about story structure and story esthetic, including things like high-concept, esthetic distance, and imagination vs immediacy. We’ll talk about character and how to introduce one and set them in motion. I have also built in a lot of time for Q &A, so that attendees can get information as applicable to them as possible.
Just so you know, this will be involved and intense. If you’ve been to one of my 1hour panel at cons, or my 3-hour block (like my Art Center talk, thank you Michael Dooley!), you know that this will be jam-packed with actual, hard-earned, non-trivial info about visual/storytelling. And this is a whole day! This should be a fun time for anyone meaningfully engaged in the craft of comics, animation, film, whether you are pre-professional, professional, or have a keen interest in art and storytelling.
We will also talk about all things industry/career or “artist’s life”related, and I’ll be happy to share my experience working both on the corporate side of movie, and the independent side of comics! So from how to pitch to a studio to how to set up your own books’ distribution… from “how do I break in?”, to “what path is best for me?” we can talk about all that.
I’ll finish with a huge thanks to the awesome Tina Price. Thank you for setting this up, and having the patience to wait for me to be ready for this! Thank you for all you have been doing for me and are doing for our community!