Post #14: Digital intervention in Sin City characters

Chapter 5: Pictorial aspects, p. 75


Yet, the level of digital interference is greater in Sin City than it is in Sky Captain because in the former it also affects characters. In several moments, the colors of eyes and of other compositional details of characters are altered. Most of the time, this happens with the purpose of emphasizing certain parts of the image, conferring on them a thematic connotation within the story. 

Digital intervention on characters Kevin and Gail.

Kevin’s opaque white glasses contrast with the rest of the image, which is almost completely dark. The purpose of the dark face and background is to emphasize his villainy whereas the white glasses reinforce the idea of an emotionless character. In the case of Gail, the red color of her lips highlights the character’s strong sex appeal.

Post #13: The green screen in Sin City

Chapter 5: Pictorial aspects, p. 75


As in Sky Captain, in Sin City characters perform in front of a green screen and not photographed landscapes. Later, the CGI is included to compose the final look of the shot. Real locations and sets are replaced by computer designed backgrounds.

Film shooting before the green screen and the later inclusion of digital images.

Post #12: CGI in Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow

Chapter 5: Pictorial aspects, p. 73




This is one example of the use of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), a process in which three-dimensional computer graphics create “virtual” backgrounds to the footage of the live-action. In this process, actors do not perform before real-life landscapes but in front of a completely green screen, which is later filled by digitally-created images. This is the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, one of the first films to be entirely produced using CGI.

From storyboard to final product: the steps of production in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Post #11: The interpolated rotoscope process in A Scanner Darkly

Chapter 5: Pictorial aspects, p. 72


A Scanner Darkly is an adaptation from Phillip K. Dick’s novel in which the director Richard Linklater uses interpolated rotoscope, a technique that digitally “draws” the scenery and characters over the original film footage, including new colors and textures in the film. The approximation between the drawn and the photographed image is evident and the final effect of the film resembles animated movies and comics.

The steps of the interpolated rotoscope process.

Post #10: Comics Page = Film Frame

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 56


When a full-page or a double-page composition does not have any incrusted panels, it is observed that this page corresponds exactly to a frame on the film screen. This is the only moment when an extraordinary equivalence between page and screen layouts of these two media is perceived. Maybe the only difference that occurs in specific moments of the adaptation is that, when a completely blank or dark full-page is transposed to the film, more details of the scenery are sometimes visible because of the few shadings of grey used in the film coloring and lighting processes, as opposed to the graphic novel black-and-white high contrast.

Top: A dark double-page composition in “That Yellow Bastard” (88, 89) and its film version.

Bottom: A blank full-page in “That Yellow Bastard” (31) and its transposition to screen, with details from the scenery.

Post #9: Comparing a page to film frames in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 56


In cases where multiple panels are arranged on one page or several small embedded panels are found in one larger panel or in a full-page composition, each panel is generally adapted as one frame of the film.

A multiple-panel page. “That Yellow Bastard”, 40.

A shot-by-shot film sequence of the above mentioned page.

Post #8: The double-page compositions in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 54


Also common in Sin City are the double-page compositions, although they are not used as frequently as the full-page layout; the double-pages often exceed the page margins and are generally used in the opening of chapters. Another significant aspect is that both full-page and double-page compositions often have to dispute the reader’s attention with other small superimposed panels.

A full-page and a double page composition with superimposed panels.

(“The Big Fat Kill”, 160; 162-63).

Post #7: Blank and dark full-pages in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 54


As it happens with other works by Frank Miller, there is a profuse use of full-page compositions in Sin City that can either comply with the space of the white page margin or not. The difference from other works that use this same page layout is that, in the hard-boiled series, characters generally appear in completely blank or dark pages, because of the high black and white contrast style.

Blank and dark full-pages. (“The Hard Good-Bye”, 34 and “That Yellow Bastard”, 57).

Post #6: Layout in Sin City

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 53


Regular three- and four-strip pages (strips similar in height and width) are quite uncommon in Sin City. There are around eight of them in Sin City: The Hard Good-Bye’s 200 pages. Strips of similar height, but divided in different ways (columns of irregular sizes) are a little more common; they occur on approximately ten pages. Equally sized panels covering a whole page are extremely rare; only three cases were found (a three-by-three, a three-by-two and a two-by-three grid on pages 73, 36 and 19 respectively.

Examples from The Hard Goodbye: Regular three- and four-strip pages (68; 77), strips of equal height, but divided in irregular columns (167) and equally-sized panels forming a three-by-three grid on a page (73).

Post #5: Miller's layout in 300

Chapter 3: Layout aspects, p. 51


Works from the same artist may also present different layout patterns. Frank Miller, for instance, is known for a great diversity in this aspect. Each of his present-day works displays a distinct quality and some of them have unusual or totally irregular page layouts in which the idea of strips as an essential element of the comics medium is completely abandoned. In general, the artist regularly employs full-page, larger-than-a-page and even double-page panoramic compositions, upon which small frames are sometimes superimposed.

A larger-than-a-page and a double-page compositions (back and front covers in Miller’s 300).

 

These extremely large compositions sometimes get to cross the hyperframe of the page, causing the page to resemble a painting or even a film photogram. Perhaps because of this auteurial characteristic, Miller’s works have inspired several adaptations to cinema. This is the case of 300, a 2007 film by director Zack Snyder.

Post #4: Transmedia Storytelling in Watchmen

Chapter 2: Narrative aspects, p. 40-41


In Snyder’s Watchmen, transmedia storytelling is mainly used to support the alternate world of the graphic novel, providing fake documents, newspaper headlines and magazine covers that confirm the events in the graphic novel and the film. Actually, a considerable part of this fictitious material is already present in the graphic novel; thus, instead of constructing new narrative details, film producers simply provided them in other media.

The website domain The New Frontiersman was created with a link to the newspaper’s profile on Flickr electronic photo album, with dozens of posters, magazine covers and newspaper pages that appear in the graphic novel, but are not seen in the film with great detail. 

At the New Frontiersman newspaper web domain, there is also the link to four videos, to which the graphic novel does not make any reference. They are a TV program on world politics, talking about the decisive role of Dr. Manhattan in the American victory in Vietnam; a government institutional video explaining the Keene Act and warning people against masked heroes; a program on Veidt Music Network imitating the MTV style; and a news report program aired on March 11^th, 1970, looking back at ten years since the existence of Dr. Manhattan. Here, again, the main purpose of these videos is to support the fictitious world of Watchmen. 




Another remarkable transmedia storytelling strategy in the film franchise is carried out by video games. The fan has the opportunity to interact with superheroes in situations that are transmedia extensions of the main work’s narrative. In the online “Minutemen Arcade”, Snyder and his team produce an old-fashioned style video game designed as the arcade 8-bit video games from the eighties. The fan is able to choose between characters Silk Spectre I and Nite Owl I to fight against their archenemy Moloch and his gang in 1942 New York.

  

Post #3: Sin City DVD Menu

Chapter 2: Narrative aspects, p. 34


In a good example of how DVD technology drew reading and viewing experiences together through the organization of film sequences in “chapters”, in the “Recut, Unrated and Extended” double DVD version of Sin City (see fig.5), the intertwined plotline of the theatrical film version is reassembled so that viewers can watch each of the four stories separately.

Post #2: The Metaphor of the Maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass

Chapter 1: Intermedial Relations, p. 14

One of the main characteristics of comics is its juxtaposition of the verbal and the visual texts, which designates Mixmedia texts. A Mixmedia text “contains complex signs in different media that would not reach coherence or self-sufficiency outside that context” (Clüver, “Estudos Interartes” 8). The juxtaposition of verbal and visual texts in comics offers the reader a third layer of meaning, as in the metaphor of the maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass, the graphic novel by Mazzuchelli and Karasik.

Paul Auster's City of Glass, page 4

In the graphic novel, the image of the buildings in New York is transformed into a maze and, later on, into one’s fingerprint on the window of Quinn’s house. This visual metaphor provides two subtexts: the fact that Quinn feels lost in New York (the maze as a metaphor for being lost) and the fact that the character has lost his identity after his wife’s and son’s deaths (the fingerprint as a metaphor for identity) and has been living through the lives of others.

Post #1: The split screen and the final credits in Ang Lee's Hulk (2003)

Chapter 1: Intermedial Relations, p. 12

The use of split screen and the final credits in Hulk evoke some formal qualities of the comics medium. This is what Irina Rajewsky calls Intermedial Reference in her text “Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality”