Alice: Halloween Scream!

The pumpkin was shot at the Borgholm Castle while doing location scouting for Alice: Demon's Gate.

Alice: Forging the background story

Petra Brewitz and I worked on character backgrounds, and a bit of background story for Alice: Demon's Gate. We delved into a diverse range of topics, from geography, to metallurgy, and sword-making.

Using real historical information enables us to create a story that will have depth. The characters will have a past, their lives will have trajectories that influence how they view the world, and the actions they take. 

Dark Knight

The picture above is the first style test where we use a composite image. I'll do a brief walk-through, showing how the picture was created.

The Borgholm Castle Ruin

The castle in the background is Borgholm Castle, a castle ruin just outside Borgholm on Öland, the 2nd largest Swedish island.

I removed the large rock, and masked out the sky, because I planned to replace it with something a bit more dramatic.

The knight is a toy I shot in a home made light box. The bright background is easy to mask out.

When we shoot the photo comic, we'll use live actors, but for a test like this, a toy works pretty well.

The sky is from an old photo. I collect photos of clouds, interesting textures, and various odds and ends that may come in handy when I create photo composites.

The picture above is a basic photo composite created in Pixelmator.

I have distorted the background sky, toned the whole picture to match the light reflected from the clouds, and increased contrast by duplicating the image, and changing the display mode of the top layer to Overlay.

This is what the image looks like after being converted with the Paintoscope filter.

I really liked the look of the axe, but the knight is way to dark.

The final step was to overlay the original picture over the Paintoscope version, change the blend mode to Luminosity, and reduce the transparency to about 45%. That brought out more detail in the knight, while keeping the overall look of a comic book drawing.

This is an early experiment, so the final comic look may be quite different. Still, at this stage in the project, I am quite happy with the look we've got.

Comic Style Tests: Preliminary Results

We are tweaking our image conversion process. Here are some preliminary results.

Comic Style Test: Increasing the Tonal Range of a Photo Comic Panel

We are testing various filters and image processing techniques in order to get a comic book look we really like.

We want to improve the tonal range of the pictures, while keeping the look and feel of comic book drawings.

Here is an early test. We'll do several more.

Jesper Andersson posed for this picture. Jesper was a member of the first A Rift in Time project.

Location Scouting the Borgholm Castle Ruin, Part 1

Alice: The Demon's Gate is officially in pre-production!

Don't hold your breath though. Petra Brewitz came up with the story idea. Now, the team will kick ideas around for awhile, and we'll start working on a manuscript.

Last week, we did take the opportunity to do a bit of location scouting at the Borgholm castle ruin on Öland. We shot quite a few pictures, which has enabled us to do a bit of testing, and work on the comic book look we want.

Here are some of our pre-production notes:

There will be more pre-production blog posts soon.