The Art of Visual Storytelling is a 4 part Gnomon Workshop DVD set in which Iain McCaig creates his own Sci Fi take of the story of The Little Mermaid.
McCaig retells the story in beats through visual means, designing the characters as he goes. He starts by plotting out the structure; beginning, middle and end, producing sketches for each. He then fills in the gaps with story beats, again producing sketches for each one then fills in the beats in between them and so on. By the end of the first DVD he has plotted out the entire story with each event illustrated. In the later volumes he goes over his process of designing each character from the story from traditional sketches through to final digitally painted character concepts.
Why oh why did I not discover this sooner???
The whole process is incredibly intuative and rather than writing pages and pages of story by the end of the first volume the whole story is effectively written visually.
McCaig went into more detail about the construction and structure of stories which gave more great insight into the process I am working through making the bible. Watching the DVD brought me back to McKee's book "Story" specifically the sections of the book regarding structure, events and value. While the character themselves are very important, in a story it is the external forces and the character's reaction to them drive the story forward.
This way of going about setting up stories and worlds is an incredibly effective way of starting the character designprocess. This way of working and formulating stories visually would be extremely effective as it would mean that at every stage up to writing the actual scripts the author would be working on improving their illustration skills. I feel that this would be very a great jump off point to carry on after the series bible is produced.
At the end of the semester I intend to try this work method to plot out the first issue of the comic.
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