Happy holidays from Run Freak Run!

by Silver on Friday, December 25th, 2015

Posted in: yay

happyholidays

Hiya! We hope you a merry and warm Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This is the time to remember those you truly care about, to be good to them, and set plans for upcoming epic adventures. This year you’ve been truly great to us in ways we couldn’t have imagined: you’ve helped us out when we were in a pinch, gave us support when we were out of energy, and stuck with us until the end and never gave up. It’s something we don’t always feel like we deserve, but we’ll take it with honor hoping to earn your trust in the future, because we’re planning to take you on a brand new journey again next year.

It will be larger than anything we’ve ever done before, more ambitious than it’s healthy, and it’ll stretch us to our limits. We couldn’t be more excited. :)

It’ll take a while before we’ll start sharing, but until then rest well, eat a lot, sleep plenty, and enjoy your well earned holiday!
With love,

Silver Saaremaeel and Kaija Rudkiewicz
2015, Berlin
merryyule

RFR page sketches

by Kaija on Saturday, November 21st, 2015

Posted in: Art, Comics, making of RFR

Preaparation is the key small

In the beginning of RFR’s production Silver bought me a Moleskine storyboarding notebook which I started using right away to sketch out the first couple of chapters. Over time, as we had more and more of the story written out, I kept adding new chapters to it.

It’s full of scribbles, each uglier than the previous, only readable to me, even if just barely. Still, this notebook marks the first, and possibly most important stage in drawing a comic book: thumbnailing the story.

Thumbnailing is not about pretty pictures; it’s your roadmap and your comic’s visual plotline. It’s crucial to be prepared and ready, knowing your overall goals and each page’s content before you zoom in on the individual panels. It’s all about story pacing, and page composition and flow, already marking places for drama and suspense. This is where I decide between a silent, one panel page, and a ten panel, action packed sequence, or how to best compose the blacks and whites and lights and shadows that the comic is basically made out of.

You will add the character acting and nuances when you get to drawing the actual panels, but for storyboarding you’ll have to think more like a storyteller than a portrait painter. The key is to always understand how each page works with multiple pages forward and back. If you have this, 80% of your decision making is basically done.

Optimally, you’d have all your story written out by the time you start thumbnailing. This is one thing we learned from RFR: have a script or at least a plotline ready before you start drawing anything. Having to make changes in writing is much easier than having to decide to throw ten inked pages out the window because the story needs to go a different way after all.

All that said, I wanted to give you a little peak into this scribbled mess I’ve been calling “RFR thumbnails”:

Smiles,
Kaya

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