PRODUCTION NOTES
Page 0000 > John: Check up on everyone.
Cut because I thought that starting off on a flash is better. There's also some weird timeline wonk - the fridge actually got sent to the bottom of Earth-C's ocean during [S] Collide, and I just forgot, lol.
Cut because I thought that starting off on a flash is better. There's also some weird timeline wonk - the fridge actually got sent to the bottom of Earth-C's ocean during [S] Collide, and I just forgot, lol.
Page 0001 > [S] Open.
Version 1: /open.html (song: Skaian Happy Flight)
Storyboards: page 1, page 2.
Unused assets: 1
Didn't stick very much to the storyboards, some characters got switched out in certain scenes. (Dave -> Roxy)
Version 1: /open.html (song: Skaian Happy Flight)
Storyboards: page 1, page 2.
Unused assets: 1
Didn't stick very much to the storyboards, some characters got switched out in certain scenes. (Dave -> Roxy)
Page 0002 > Select your character.
Unused outfits: Jane, Roxy.
Made the mistake of not drawing out these panels before putting them in the flash. Jane's outfit changed, Roxy's didn't.
Unused outfits: Jane, Roxy.
Made the mistake of not drawing out these panels before putting them in the flash. Jane's outfit changed, Roxy's didn't.
Page 0105 > [S] STRIF---E!
Unused drawing: 1.
Decided this was going to be an interactive page rather than a set of panels, for better or worse.
Unused drawing: 1.
Decided this was going to be an interactive page rather than a set of panels, for better or worse.
Page 01?? > Davesprite: Say goodbye.
Unused dialogue: 1
Timeline fuckery, things wound up happening in a different order.
Unused dialogue: 1
Timeline fuckery, things wound up happening in a different order.
Page 197+ > Caliborn's masterpiece
GOD okay, so Caliborn's masterpiece and the English fight is kind of a setpiece moment for Homestuck. It's novel and pretty funny, especially the way that by virtue of being the final boss of a video game, the English fight cannot be taken seriously, effectively leaving the kids right before a video game-ass point of no return? In the context of BDTH though, it's kind of a double-edged sword. I kind of needed to go here to get the Vriska plot ball rolling, and I extremely dislike the way that the epilogues took it - it's just kind of a brutal carnage festival in a way that feels... boring. Along with that, the ramifications of that English fight aren't the same as the ramifications for this one - in the Homestuck Epilogues it's kind of a loadbearing scene, once it finishes, the whole thing quite literally collapses around it. But in BDTH, this scene rolls right into the story I actually wanted.
So there's a couple things I'm thinking about - the English fight was never something we were meant to see, in Homestuck. It kind of sets up the Epilogues as this cursed tome full of things we weren't supposed to see but a cruel author brought us them anyway. There's a lot of allusions to the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2 in this segment, for that reason. It still doesn't matter in the grand scheme of BDTH, it sets up a scene in Act 2, where Vriska's presence in a scene allows us to see another thing that's not typically shown. I'm writing this before that scene is in the comic though, so like... knock on wood. Aside from that, it's yet another #JustAct1Thing of cleaning up the loose ends of Homestuck, getting us to the place where the Snapchats ended up, except much slower and with a whole bunch more words.
So I'm stuck with this scene which to the story we're coming from doesn't matter at all, and to the story we're going to is no more than a one-off inciting incident. Caliborn is not planned to show up again. Sorry? I was having a GRAND old time writing him, for what it's worth.
So I kind of wanted to have fun with it, since if it can't be plot relevant and important, it can at the very least, be fun.
I tried a handful of things for this one, since I always wanted this to be the part where I lean into the kind of meta that Homestuck is, and flex my ability to do a whole bunch of things, for no reason other than to do so. I feel some variety of ways about the meta stuff but I don't actually have that much meta, fourth-wall leaning nonsense in the plot, so I thought I might as well make the most of the space while I'm in it.
First off, I wanted to get a panel in place for whatever came next. So I used a scribble mode sketch. This panel got abandoned when I decided on the fake manga scan look. [1]
I also had a bunch of play dough left over from a shelved project and I considered using it for Caliborn's masterpiece a few times. In practice, Caliborn's claymation setup in the comic was almost identical to mine, read into that however you want. In the end, I didn't like the results I got for the amount of work it wound up being and scrapped it. The set wound up being just a little bit too small to get convincingly fake results, and the set was so shoddily constructed that if I turned in my chair too fast, there's a chance my ponytail would spin a bit fast and just wreck the whole thing, like... the stage itself is a fucking White Claw box with brown construction paper on it.
I got 4 bad photos off my phone and you can see them here: [1, 2, 3, 4]
(The soup can you see there is minestrone, uneaten. It's been there for months now.)
However, not ready to abandon the claymation look yet, since it was the coolest thing in the masterpiece, I gave it a shot in 3D. I used a clay material I found on Gumroad, and since I'm loosely familiar with the process, and the shapes involved were pretty simple, I thought it shouldn't be too hard, no? I thought this even though I've never finished anything in 3D that I was really proud of, and I thought I could render a photorealistic set with high-fidelity textures and lots of polygons, even though the computer I'm using can hardly run Fallout 3. It went GREAT.
This is the only render I have of this stage. [1]
I went with manga scans after this because I inevitably realized "oh god I'm going to just have to draw, aren't I" and. Yeah.
Turns out you have to draw comics.
All in all, I'm glad I went with something that I'm pretty competent at, and the joke of Caliborn trying really hard on comics is so good to me.
Because I too am trying very hard at all times, but I am not Caliborn.
But in practice, polished comic pages are a lot of work, and spending too long on pages got to be dreary, when how fast I was moving this story along was part of the appeal. I can't spend a full week on a single page. So I cut a bunch of the sequence I had planned out, despite ostensibly liking the content.
The panel in which Caliborn says "LET'S GET THIS CARNIVAL OF CARNAGE MOVING." was originally a closeup of Jake, followed by these pages.
Commentary
GOD okay, so Caliborn's masterpiece and the English fight is kind of a setpiece moment for Homestuck. It's novel and pretty funny, especially the way that by virtue of being the final boss of a video game, the English fight cannot be taken seriously, effectively leaving the kids right before a video game-ass point of no return? In the context of BDTH though, it's kind of a double-edged sword. I kind of needed to go here to get the Vriska plot ball rolling, and I extremely dislike the way that the epilogues took it - it's just kind of a brutal carnage festival in a way that feels... boring. Along with that, the ramifications of that English fight aren't the same as the ramifications for this one - in the Homestuck Epilogues it's kind of a loadbearing scene, once it finishes, the whole thing quite literally collapses around it. But in BDTH, this scene rolls right into the story I actually wanted.
So there's a couple things I'm thinking about - the English fight was never something we were meant to see, in Homestuck. It kind of sets up the Epilogues as this cursed tome full of things we weren't supposed to see but a cruel author brought us them anyway. There's a lot of allusions to the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2 in this segment, for that reason. It still doesn't matter in the grand scheme of BDTH, it sets up a scene in Act 2, where Vriska's presence in a scene allows us to see another thing that's not typically shown. I'm writing this before that scene is in the comic though, so like... knock on wood. Aside from that, it's yet another #JustAct1Thing of cleaning up the loose ends of Homestuck, getting us to the place where the Snapchats ended up, except much slower and with a whole bunch more words.
So I'm stuck with this scene which to the story we're coming from doesn't matter at all, and to the story we're going to is no more than a one-off inciting incident. Caliborn is not planned to show up again. Sorry? I was having a GRAND old time writing him, for what it's worth.
So I kind of wanted to have fun with it, since if it can't be plot relevant and important, it can at the very least, be fun.
I tried a handful of things for this one, since I always wanted this to be the part where I lean into the kind of meta that Homestuck is, and flex my ability to do a whole bunch of things, for no reason other than to do so. I feel some variety of ways about the meta stuff but I don't actually have that much meta, fourth-wall leaning nonsense in the plot, so I thought I might as well make the most of the space while I'm in it.
First off, I wanted to get a panel in place for whatever came next. So I used a scribble mode sketch. This panel got abandoned when I decided on the fake manga scan look. [1]
I also had a bunch of play dough left over from a shelved project and I considered using it for Caliborn's masterpiece a few times. In practice, Caliborn's claymation setup in the comic was almost identical to mine, read into that however you want. In the end, I didn't like the results I got for the amount of work it wound up being and scrapped it. The set wound up being just a little bit too small to get convincingly fake results, and the set was so shoddily constructed that if I turned in my chair too fast, there's a chance my ponytail would spin a bit fast and just wreck the whole thing, like... the stage itself is a fucking White Claw box with brown construction paper on it.
I got 4 bad photos off my phone and you can see them here: [1, 2, 3, 4]
(The soup can you see there is minestrone, uneaten. It's been there for months now.)
However, not ready to abandon the claymation look yet, since it was the coolest thing in the masterpiece, I gave it a shot in 3D. I used a clay material I found on Gumroad, and since I'm loosely familiar with the process, and the shapes involved were pretty simple, I thought it shouldn't be too hard, no? I thought this even though I've never finished anything in 3D that I was really proud of, and I thought I could render a photorealistic set with high-fidelity textures and lots of polygons, even though the computer I'm using can hardly run Fallout 3. It went GREAT.
This is the only render I have of this stage. [1]
I went with manga scans after this because I inevitably realized "oh god I'm going to just have to draw, aren't I" and. Yeah.
Turns out you have to draw comics.
All in all, I'm glad I went with something that I'm pretty competent at, and the joke of Caliborn trying really hard on comics is so good to me.
Because I too am trying very hard at all times, but I am not Caliborn.
But in practice, polished comic pages are a lot of work, and spending too long on pages got to be dreary, when how fast I was moving this story along was part of the appeal. I can't spend a full week on a single page. So I cut a bunch of the sequence I had planned out, despite ostensibly liking the content.
The panel in which Caliborn says "LET'S GET THIS CARNIVAL OF CARNAGE MOVING." was originally a closeup of Jake, followed by these pages.