Long John

I’ve tasked myself with making short videos of each page of Chapter 4 (viewable on my YouTube channel). I’ve been calling them “motion comics” though I don’t think that’s the correct term at all––those speak to a much higher budget and effort than what I’m doing––when they’re really more of an automated guided view through each page.

The secret joy I’ve been having started when I decided to start recording sparse guitar accompaniment. For the opening pages, I recorded a few tracks of loose melodies in E-minor and chopped them up and combined them depending on the length of a page’s video. Starting with this page, though, the tone changes a bit and while I don’t think people would have complained from either 1. using the same tracks again or 2. simply recording new tracks of the same style, I knew that for the next few pages things lighten up considerably and wanted the tone of the music to match.

Such thought is sheer manipulation, but so is the video version of each page––instead of letting the reader read the page as they want to, I’m forcing them to look at the panels in a certain way. Sure, it may be the way I intended people to read the page but that only matters in so far as it takes me to get a page drawn. I can use a bunch of tools to––with hope––guide the reader along my preferred path, but it’s not something I can literally control. I figured since I was already forcing the reader’s gaze, I may as well force the tone of the scene by switching up the music as well.

Where the music on the first run of pages could be described as sleepy, sullen, and a little dark, the music introduced with this page is much more melodic, agile, and fun-spirited (written in D-major, for what it’s worth). Along with that, this track of music was much more designed than the original ones. I had to work out the chord progression (instead of the sort of droning tone of the original music) and sections to keep it from becoming too repetitive (even for a 45-second video) and I like how it turned out. I hope you do, too.

The thumbnail layouts for this page.