Subject:
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Re: Picture Story
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:36:43 GMT
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In lugnet.general, Alex Desbiens wrote:
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Now, I want to know if anybody have any advice before I begin. Maybe tips for
shootings , selecting a story , writing text or showing it to the AFOL
community.
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Hi Alex,
Good luck on your new project. I think that before you start an illustrated
story, there are a number of questions you want to ask yourself:
Original story vs. pre-existing story/novel/movie? Personally I go with
pre-existing story, but then I’m not very good at writing original stories and
I’m more interested in the LEGO creations. It looks like you’re going with
something pre-existing, which leads to the next question:
Book vs. movie? If you can watch a movie, it gives you ideas about good camera
angles, building designs, and so forth. OTOH, it can limit your creativity.
Also, even if you go with your own designs for buildings, characters, etc,
you’ll get a lot of comments critiquing it for not looking like the movie, which
can be annoying. So I’d personally go with a book, or even a short story, which
leads to the next question:
Scope of the project--is this going to be an epic story, told in many chapters,
or are you going to do something much shorter (say 10-20 pictures plus
accompanying text)? Big epic stories are really impressive, and can be a great
LEGO project that covers years. The downfall of this is that life interferes,
you become interested in other projects, and soon you find you’ve gone two years
without updating your story. For a starter I would suggest you do a much
shorter story. That way you can present the finished product all at once.
Balance of text vs pictures--are you going to have pages of text with a few
pictures, or only a line or two of text to accompany each picture? This all
depends on the story you pick. If it is something very well known, you don’t
need to include much text, as you can assume your audience already knows preety
much what’s going on. OTOH, if it is unknown (or an original story), you’ll
generally need a lot of text. Personally I think it is best to go with just a
few lines per image, as your readers are going to focus largely on the LEGO
creations.
Choice of the story. As implied above, I think it’s best to go with something
shorter, that is generally well known. Also it’s important to choose something
that uses a few interesting locations, so that you have interesting things to
build, and not an over-reliance on dialogue, since pictures of minifigs doing
things are more interesting than pictures of minifigs talking.
For illustration of how I’ve approached this, let me share my
Cask of Amontillado
(not because it’s so great, just because it involved these various questions).
First the story choice - I had previously gotten praise for posting an
illustrated version of the Raven on Halloween, so as the next Halloween
approached I wanted to do another Edgar Allen Poe story. From my own limited
experience, The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The
Cask of Amontillado are probably the best known of Poe’s writings (yes, people
probably all know the name “The Fall of the House of Usher”, but I for one had
no idea what it is about, and while people may or may not know the name of the
story the Cask of Amontillado is maybe less well known, but the final scene of
bricking the notorious Fortunato up in a wall is iconic and has been reproduced
in many forms, including a Simpsons episode). For some reason I chose Cask
(though I do plan to do the Tell-Tale Heart and Pit and the Pendulum in the
future) (I even Bricklinked the figs for Pit, but then was involved in moving
across country this past Halloween, so was a bit busy). This is in the public
domain, so I was able to download the text from Project Gutenberg. That was good because I printed out the story so that I
could mark it up. I read through the story a couple of times, and then went and
circled key events. I knew there had to be an initial conversation between the
two main characters, which led to the invitation back to Montresor’s home. Once
there, Montresor leads Fortunato down into the depths of the catacombs, going
deeper and deeper. Finally Montresor traps his rival and bricks him up in the
wall, leaving him to die. So I knew I had to build at least three scenes - the
town exterior, inside Montresor’s home, and down in the catacombs (in the end I
actually built five, as I added the stairwell and broke the catacombs into two
different scenes). I went through the story and underlined key passages of
dialogue and description, trying to come up with the bare minimum that would
still faithfully tell the story, and I planned an image to go with every few
lines. I’ll let others make suggestions about photography, but I’ll simply say
that the key is to take many many more pictures than you need, and keep only the
best. That’s the joy of digital cameras, after all. You look like a genius
photographer if noone sees all the blurred, cut off, obstructed, or otherwise
ruined pictures. In presenting the actual story once you’ve got all your photos
edited, I think that it’s best to do a picture or two per page, with -next-
buttons to go on, but it’s also certainly possible to put it all on one page and
just have people scroll down to read on. If you have your own website you can
do this with simple html. If you do not have your own site, this is a little
tougher. You can certainly use MOCpages and just put the captions next to the
thumbnails, but people would have to click the thumbnails to blow them up, and
that might be a bit cumbersome. Flickr might be better, but I don’t know enough
about Flickr to know for sure. Once you’ve got a page up on the web (and
checked all the links to make sure that they work) post it all over the various
LEGO websites. Lugnet of course, but as many of the others as you can as well
(particularly if it falls into a particular theme - if it’s science fiction, be
sure to post in Clasic-Space and FBTB, if it’s medieval in Classic-Castle, etc.
Bruce
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Picture Story
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| Hi everybody. I'm surfing on Lugnet for sometimes now and I noticed all these great picture story ( you know these story where you have a picture of a Lego scene and text beneath. The most famous of them is the BrickTestament.) made in Lego. While I (...) (18 years ago, 22-Jun-06, to lugnet.general)
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