Making of Re\Visioned: Activision - The Backstory

I've been promising this on Twitter for several days now, so let's get to it - a behind the scenes look at the making of each episode of Re\Visioned: Activision. But first, a little history:
Re\Visioned was created by my former boss at GameTap, Ricardo Sanchez, who thought it would be cool create some original animation based on existing videogame IP from the GameTap library. But rather than doing a straight adaptation of these games, Rick wanted to present new takes on the games, or as he put it, "revisioned." And when he added a backslash between "re" and "visioned," a title was born.

Initially, Rick wanted to hire great animators to spearhead the project, but given the budget and time restraints, he was willing to entertain other ideas - which is when I floated the notion of hiring comic book writers and artists to handle story and art, with the idea that those things could be handed off to an animation studio for production. He liked the idea, and then we all went back to what we were doing.

A few months later, Rick struck a deal with The Hero Initiative, a non-profit comic book industry group that raises money to help industry veterans who gave years to the business, often without a safety net or retirement plan. The Hero Initiative would provide scripts and art from a mix of popular current creators and respected veterans in need of work. Included in the group were writers Mark Waid, Paul Jenkins, John Ostrander, William Messner-Loebs, the late Steve Gerber, and Hero Initiative president Jim McLauchlin; and artists Dave Simons, Armando Gil, Joe Rubenstein, Flint Henry, Bob Hall, and Claude St. Aubin. A really talented bunch.

Scripts were written, designs were drawn. And then a decision was made at GameTap to move Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider, a more high-profile, super ambitious project intended to be season two of the series to the head of the line. The Activision project was put on the back-burner, and approved scripts and designs languished for close to a year.

When we finally did get back to Re\Visioned: Activision, the bar had been raised significantly by the quality and complexity of Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider, and while we had less money to throw at Activision, my executive producer, Chris Peeler, and I knew that we needed to find a way to live up to R:TR. With that thought in mind, we went back in to the Activision materials we had commissioned, and found that while we had a good project, some of the scripts were too modest in scope. After consulting with the boss, it was agreed that we would use the materials created by the Hero Initiative as a starting point...

More tomorrow.

-EB

Jeffrey Brown's Sketchbook

Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown is blogging, and today he's posted about an animated project we're collaborating on called Jeffrey Brown's Sketchbook. Check it out, won't you?

Just about four years ago, I approached Jeffrey about the possibility of adapting his superhero parody/homage Bighead into a cartoon. But over time, the idea of doing something completely original became appealing, which resulted in Sketchbook. Here's an excerpt from the exclusive mini-comic drawn by Jeffrey for the pitch:
Now, we could tell you here on the blog how "we've found a way to reduce litigation while also increasing entertainment," but that would be kind of like giving away the farm. However, if you're an entertainment and/or animation network and/or internet video website executive with discerning taste in indie comics, we'd be happy to send you a package including the full mini-comic containing the answer to this age-old dilemma, so succinctly laid out by Jeffrey above in panel number 6. Just shoot me an email care of info@9panelgrid.com.

(I'd also recommend this animated trailer for Jeffrey's book Little Things, from Touchstone Books.)

-EB

Decatur Book Festival 2009

I had such a good time last year being part of the Decatur Book Festival as a professional writer that I decided to volunteer this year to help with programming. We're trying to get Neil Gaiman, the brilliant author of novels (American Gods), comics (Sandman), and children's books (Coraline) to come this year, and you can help by clicking on the widget below:

View all Atlanta events at Eventful

Go ahead, click it to show Neil how much we want him to come to Decatur, even if you don't live in here. It's a tremendous event.

-EB

Motion Comics Are Here

The big news coming out of the New York Comic-Con this weekend - mainstream superhero comics news, anyway - was the announcement of in-continuity Spider-Woman motion comics by Marvel Comics' top writer, Brian Michael Bendis, and his brilliant long-time collaborator Alex Maleev. You can read interviews about this new venture here and here. I was particularly encouraged by what Bendis had to say; he recognizes that motion comics are neither comics nor animation, but instead something somewhere in between, and perhaps a totally new form of graphic fiction. And not without their challenges, as I wrote about recently. I'm going to write more about the topic this week when I've had a little more time to digest this news and do some additional research, but having Bendis tackle this nascent form of sort-of comics storytelling is a good thing. He's a smart writer, his work I think is ideally suited to this kind of limited animation, and he's a mensch. Which is neither here nor there, but I had the pleasure of interviewing him once for pilot I shot for GameTap TV (you can read about that experience here), and he was a mensch.

More on this soon.

-EB

Twittering

Yeah, I've got a Twitter account. I don't know why, to be perfectly honest. I've got this here blog thang, and I've got the Facebook for my witty one-line status updates, and wisecracking about other people's updates, so do I need the Twitter? Probably not. How connected does one person need to be? But we're living in a Web 2.0 world, so here we are, with all these digital connection points.

Anyway, I bring it up because tonight I got an email alerting me that I had another follower on my Twitter account, which I had not updated since starting the account in September of last year - and the new follower of Elliot on Twitter is none other than one of my favorite bloggers, a guy named Dave Campbell, currently of The Society for the Advancement of Dave, and formerly of the comics blog Dave's Longbox, now dormant but still recommended if'n you're likin' the comics. Why he's following me on Twitter, I don't know, but it's certainly a pleasant surprise.

So now that I've got three followers - one of whom is my brother - I'm starting to feel a responsibility to update the Twitter periodically. I shall endeavour to do so. And when I spell "endeavour," I shall do so with the British "u." Because it's late in the evening and I'm feeling fancy.

-EB

Big Website Update; Jeffrey Brown

As indicated in the title of this post, I made a big update to my website today, adding a section for my current projects, cleverly titled "Current Projects." Go there. Click on it. You'll be glad you did! I'd make a money back offer if you were to find the experience unsatisfying, but I'm not charging you anything to visit.

One of the projects you'll find on the Current Projects page is something I've been teasing off and on here, which we've decided to reveal - and if you're an indie comics fan, perhaps you've guessed, based on the post-semicolon portion of this blog entry's title, that it involves the amazing cartoonist Jeffrey Brown. We've put together a pitch for an animated show we're calling Jeffrey Brown's Sketchbook. We're hoping to find a home for it soon. Here's a small excerpt from the proposal (click for a larger view):
I think Jeffrey really captured the essence of my chest hair. More on this (Sketchbook, not the essence of my chest hair) as it develops.

-EB

Website Update

I updated elliotblake.com this morning to include the Jim Lee Talks... interview series I did for GameTap. Those videos have been available on YouTube for about a year now, but I thought they were worth aggregating in one place, now that GameTap has dispensed with all video programming.

If you have not seen these videos, but you're a fan of Jim Lee (he's a living legend amongst comic book artists if you're not a fan), they're worth checking out, as Jim talks about his artistic process and gives a tour of Wildstorm, his San Diego-based studio. He was a gracious host and an engaging personality, so producing these videos was a pleasure.

-EB

A Day at Gaijin Studios

I mentioned last week that I was finally getting to a project I'm pretty excited about, and while I don't want to give away too much in the way of details, I can tell you this much: interviews for the pilot episode of a new show I've cooked up with my co-producer, the talented and award-winning Will Payne (also late of GameTap/Turner Broadcasting), were shot last Thursday at the offices of Gaijin Studios, one of the premiere creative studios in the comic book industry. Here's Will and I with Cully Hamner (center), the comic book artist best known for the new Blue Beetle at DC Comics and the mini-series Red with writer Warren Ellis, which was recently optioned for a film:
Cully and his studio-mates - Brian Stelfreeze, Laura Martin, Tony Shasteen, and Doug Wagner - kindly allowed us to invade their space for a day, and they really couldn't have been more gracious if they tried. Here's what I can tell you about the pilot: it was shot in HD, and we had a jib arm, allowing for some really smooth camera shots. I think it's going to look great, and it's definitely going to be interesting. More will be revealed as the project comes together.

-EB

Photos From My Panel Appearance with Scott McCloud

DECATUR, GA - 9/17/08 (Photos by Gary W. Meek, Copyright 2008 Agnes Scott College)
There I am (above) with comics genius Scott McCloud at Agnes Scott College's panel on The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which was the common reading for incoming freshmen. I was asked to be on the panel to talk about the adaptation of Persepolis from graphic novel to animated feature film. Scott is talking about Persepolis while I sit idly by, hoping I don't come off like a dumbass while waiting for my turn to speak. Seriously, though, as a comics fan and as a writer, to get to be on a panel with Scott McCloud was very cool.

Here (above), I'm pretending like I know what I'm talking about while describing a scene I particularly enjoyed in the book and in the film. I was very impressed by how the filmmakers, one of whom was Satrapi, the author and artist of the book, were able to let go of the narrative form inherent to the source material - a comic book - to fully take advantage of the medium of animation. The scene pictured above is from the sequence in the book where teenage Marjane goes through a growth spurt. It was represented very differently in the movie, but the overall effect was the same. Well done.

Here are the panel participants in a staged post-panel photo opportunity. We're all hanging out by the ashtray - but no one is smoking, except for my shoes. I always think it's appropriate to wear my flame-adorned Chuck Taylors at public speaking engagements (like I've had so many).

-EB

The Great Scott McCloud

I had a really interesting two-week period, starting labor day weekend when I was featured as an "author" at the Decatur Book Festival ("author" in quotes because that was how I was designated, regardless of the fact that I'm not one; writer, yes, author, grand overstatement), and culminating last week in giving a guest lecture to a New/Emerging Media class at Georgia State, having dinner with comics genius Scott McCloud, and then appearing on a panel with him at Agnes Scott College last Wednesday morning to discuss the graphic novel and film Persepolis. Four public appearances, and no one threw anything at me, so I feel reasonably confident that I didn't suck too badly.

Anyway, the highlight for me was Scott McCloud. First, he's just a really nice guy. Second, he's really, really smart, and getting to talk to someone who has thought so deeply about his art form, comics, was a treat. Scott gave a public talk last Tuesday night at Agnes Scott, called Comics: A Medium in Transition, which was essentially a distillation of two of his three seminal non-fiction works, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. A "distillation" maybe doesn't sound so great, but he puts on a really brisk, interesting presentation, using Keynote (Apple's PowerPoint challenger) to present images that illustrate his points and supplement his talk. Great stuff - I'm going to have to learn how to use that. Scott's work, and his presentation of that work to a campus audience really did a lot for the acceptance of comics on the Agnes Scott campus, and it's really great to see this form that so many people love finally get a critical eye cast upon it (which has been slowly happening for about 15 years now) - because it's in looking at the medium seriously and critically that it can continue to grow and flourish, and in America anyway, move beyond the superhero comics that dominate the mainstream. (Full disclosure: I buy a ton of superhero comics, and I'm not ashamed to say it.)

Scott also illustrated the comic introducing Google's Chrome web browser, and it was interesting to hear him talk about what went into that, as well. A lot of secrecy for many months, and a great deal of research. Since the comic hit the web, there have been many hacks/remixes of it made, involving people writing new dialog for the characters, re-ordering the panels for different effect, and generally just messing around with it in photoshop (I've considered attempting a remix myself). I asked him if he had seen these appropriations of his work, and he said he had, and that furthermore, there were a lot of really great ones out there - he seemed tickled by the idea that his comic about an open-source browser was being used, in a sense, as an open source comic.

My one regret of my Scott McCloud experience was that I asked him to contribute a voice to a show I'm putting together, about comics, and he passed - mostly I think because I picked a poor time to ask him (at the end of a long day), and I didn't do a good job of explaining my show and how much time it would take to record the voiceover (about thirty seconds - it was just one line). Anyway, I certainly do not hold his passing against him, and I hope that if I can get the show off the ground that he will one day make an appearance, perhaps to plug his next work.

-EB

Brian Bendis...

...is the man. In my job, I'm lucky to get to do some really cool stuff. And today, I got to interview Brian Bendis, one of the top writers in comics. Anyone who knows me knows I love the comic books, so this was a real treat.

I've spent the week working on a pilot for a new webshow for GameTap.com, called "Hey, Kids! Comics!" I've wanted to do a tv show about comics for about three years now, having come up with the idea and developed it with my friend Elise Belknap as a half-hour tv show back when I was just a guy working for an independent animation studio, with absolutely no contacts in that part of the television business. So naturally, it didn't go anywhere.

Flash forward to now. I'm no longer just a dude working for an animation studio - I'm the guy producing the animation, for GameTap. I was privileged to be the producer on a project called "Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider", which I'll write more about in another post. This week, my fellow producers and I are engaged in a little competition to see who can produce the best pilot for a new show, and rather than do something animated - which I did last year with my associate producer Chris Jordan (we won) - I decided to take a crack at my comics show, and redeveloped it as a five-minute web show. New and noteworthy books of the week; the big rumor of the week with comicbookresources.com's Rich Johnston, writer of the long running column "Lying in the Gutters"; and an interview to be conducted over Xbox Live, while playing Halo 3 against the one and only Brian Michael Bendis, writer, gamer, raconteur. I emailed Brian and asked him to be on the show, and he generously agreed to appear.

Today was the day of the interview. We finally got around to pulling out the GameTap TV Xbox 360 and plugged it in, only to discover that we couldn't log on to Xbox live due to the corporate firewall at our offices. It took some serious pleading with security and IT to open up a port for us to use, and finally, an hour before the cameras were scheduled to roll, we got on. We played a test game in multiplayer mode. And then we called Bendis. The idea was to do a private, one-on-one match in Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, while the host of the show asked Brian penetrating questions about the Halo comic and the upcoming Secret Invasion series from Marvel. Sounds great, right? Totally unique tv. Unfortunately, because of some limitation in the firewall, we couldn't engage Mr. Bendis one on one. We tried all sorts of things, all while Brian waited patiently, listening to us get frustrated on his speakerphone. Finally, we opted for a straight, on-camera interview. It went really well. Bendis gives a good interview, and he's an engaging subject. I'm looking forward to editing it together tomorrow.

But really, the whole point of this post is that Brian Bendis is a mensch. In the comics world, he's a rock star, and could behave like one. But he doesn't. He's a genuinely nice guy, and his mother deserves kudos for raising him right.

Thanks, Brian!