Hi there, my name is Farhan, I’m the writer of Digitopia, welcome to page 2 of ‘Digitopia – The Web Comic’, which the team and I working very hard on making into ‘Digitopia – The Graphic Novel’.

As with each of these pages I like to provide some kind of background on the story and the creative and production process, not so much that we’ve followed, but that we’ve built up ourselves.

Looking back at this page it was quite early in our team working together.  Basically we are spread out all over the world – Seb is in Buenos Aires in Argentina, I’m in London, UK and Simon is in Melbourne in Australia – it’s really a global team, you can meet them on the ‘Meet The Team‘ page.

I thought I’d talk very quickly on how we managed to bridge all those thousands of miles and the fourteen hour time gap between Buenos Aires and Melbourne – actually we had a few misses as either I would calculate the calendar invite timings incorrectly, someone would have a Skype or OS update running as we’d kick off our meeting or general time spent on trying to get our webcams set up.  It’d either be an early morning for Seb or Simon.

Once we got over those initial hiccups, we actually managed to build a workflow – based around

  • Slack – a super advanced IM system
  • Trello – our Kanban board to plot out our tasks and know what we’re working on – or supposed to be working on
  • Google Docs – which we are using as our CMS
  • Skype – obviously talking but using its screensharing software

If you want to go further in depth on the production process and how you could do this too check out the blog post I wrote on my main blog here.  I go step by step in that post with lots of screengrabs so you can repeat the process if that’s something you’d be interested in learning.

Below is the layout, the initial inks and the original script page for this, it’s always so fascinating to see how the page has evolved from an initial idea and all the work involved to get it to the final image.

 

Original Layout

Original Inks

 

Original Text

 

PAGE TWO (eight panels)

Panel 1.
On the other side of the carnage an establishing shot of a building ruins, nestled in amongst others, there is smoke and dust billowing from it.

CAP (JAY):
And here I am. My property is apparently now worth something.

Panel 2.
Closer up shot of outside of building, give the impression of moving closer to the building. Light beams down from the clouds to spotlight the remains of the building shell, on a lower level, a hole blown through to a makeshift basement.

Panel 3.
Over the shoulder shot of JAY in the delivery position as REEMA, bathed in light from the hole above, is doing all she can to push out a baby – Jay comforts REEMA as best he can as he extols her to keep pushing.

Panel 4.
By the upper window of the building shell, on a higher perch Silas is returning fire with a low level rifle (maybe an ancient looking bolt-action rifle) back to the oncoming CONFEDERATE ARMY. It certainly doesn’t look like it will do any harm to anything, much less and oncoming tank.

SILAS (shouting downstairs):
Jay, we gotta get out of here! Now!

SFX:
Rifle shot

Panel 5.
Back with Jay, he hears and ignores Silas at the same time. He keeps his focus on the job in hand.

REEMA (through her pain):
Jay, go, we’re not going to make it, just go!

Panel 6.
Silas’ POV, the oncoming tanks have broken through whatever futile blockages were ahead of them and are now in the near distance.

SILAS (OP):
Jay, we have to leave now or we are all dead!

SFX:
Tank rumbling or building crashing down

Panel 7.
Reema screams in pain as she pushes so incredibly hard. Her scream is drowned out by the cries of a NEW BORN BABY – Reema doubles her efforts as Jay leans in to help baby on her way out.

SFX:
New born baby cries

Panel 8.
Silas above can hear the sounds of the baby, he closes his eyes, raises his hands and head to the heavens above and offers a silent prayer of thanks. Maybe below in the background have JAY in silhouette raising the baby above his head in the shaft of light from the hole above.

CAP (SILAS):
God help this child, born into this world.

SFX (OP):
New born baby cries.

Hope you enjoyed this page, we’ll be aiming to launch a new page on this blog every week till the end of 2017.

The best way to keep up to date on all of this is to subscribe to the newsletter, where I’ll have more exclusive content, have the latest news on how you can get your own copy of the comic book and eventually the graphic novel as we work towards it.

You can use either the form below or go to the Subscribe page to do that.

Have a look round the rest of the site while you’re here, if you want to follow me on twitter you can do so here.

Otherwise remember to hit the ‘Share‘ and ‘Like‘ buttons below to tell your friends about ‘Digitopia – The Web Comic’.

Thanks

Farhan