Motion Comics

There's been a lot of talk lately about "motion comics," which is the process of taking an existing comic book property and turning it into a video by adding some limited animation, voice work, music, and sound effects, as has been done with the high-profile "motion comics" adaptations of Watchmen and Batman: Black & White (both of which are available on iTunes). "Motion Comic" itself is an oxymoronic term, as comics are a static medium; to quote Mark Waid, again, "a comic story is made up of frozen moments. Screen stills. Snapshots." So it's a tough thing to create a "motion comic," because by adding motion what you have created is, by definition, no longer a comic. It's an argument of semantics, I know, but "motion comic" is ultimately just a fancy name for "limited animation." Nevertheless, since "motion comics" is now the term in common use, I'll bow to convention and use it from this point forth sans the quotation marks.

So, as I said above, it's a tough thing to make a motion comic, for a couple of reasons beyond semantics: 1) if you're too respectful of the material, as I feel was the case with the adaptation of the first issue of Watchmen, you wind up with something that's poorly paced and too limited in animation; and 2) it's easy to get too tied to the tropes of the medium you're trying to adapt, especially the word balloons. Both the Watchmen motion comic and MTV's adaptation of Invincible use the world balloons in conjunction with voiceover, despite the fact that having the characters speak obviates the need for the balloons themselves. It's a young medium, motion comics, and how you can adapt a comic into something less than full animation but more than an animatic, with a (presumably) limited budget and schedule is still being figured out.

But...

...if you'd like to see what I think is a good example of an early motion comic, I'd like to offer the following episode of the GameTap series Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider - "A Complicated Woman." Produced by me, written by Jim Lee and Christos Gage, designed and laid out by the fine Wildstorm crew of Carlos D'Anda, Michael Lopes, JJ Kirby, and Oliver Nome, with final animation by the San Francisco based studio Ghostbot.



We were not setting out to make a motion comic with this episode of Re\Visioned - the term had not yet been invented when we got started in mid-2007 - but in early talks, Wildstorm VP-General Manager Hank Kanalz and I (with the blessing of Re\Visioned series creator/GameTap VP Rick Sanchez and executive producer Chris Peeler) quickly arrived at a creative strategy that would play to Wildstorm's strengths as a comic book studio - we would make a living comic book, utilizing limited animation and great Wildstorm art. I think we arrived at a reasonable hybrid, still employing some of the tools of comics, such as visible sound effects, captions, panel borders, and dynamic posing, and marrying those to animation that was for the most part very limited, except for in a couple of action sequences which received a more fully animated treatment for greater impact. Is it perfect? No, but I do think this could provide a good road map for future attempts at motion comic creation.

And I'm available for just that sort of thing, by the way - if you have any questions, please contact me via the email link in my profile to the right.

-EB
p.s. I found the video on YouTube, evidently uploaded by someone in Russia who felt like pirating the video gave them enough ownership to put their own logo over it. CroftNotes.ru had nothing to do with the making of "A Complicated Woman."