MS Paint Adventures: Storyboards
These are storyboard adaptations of Homestuck Flashes.
This project is not yet complete. See below for more details of
what I've made, why, and how you could help me.
See also:
FAQ
- What is a storyboard?
-
A storyboard is a sequence of images representing some video art like a film or game,
sometimes accompanied by text describing scenes and their transitions and timing.
They are usually used to explore or specify the art before you make it, but in this
case I have made storyboard versions of Homestuck SWFs using still images
grabbed from the finished work.
- Why are you making them?
-
A bunch of slightly related reasons.
- I maintain an archive of Homestuck.
Especially on mobile devices it can be hard to run Flash,
which prevents some readers from enjoying the story.
Storyboards can form a lightweight substitute for those parts of the narrative.
(Video is another approach, but it is much more heavyweight, and harder to produce especially
for Flashes with some interactive components.)
- It's part of my larger idea to describe all the things.
- It provides a framework for my much larger idea to relate all the things - you have to be able to say when in a Flash something happened.
- For fun and entertainment!
- What state is the project in?
-
At the time of writing, lots of stuff is missing entirely or at least lacks text descriptions. And my real job is taking up a lot of my energy, so don't expect rapid progress! Here's how things have gone so far:
- I grabbed frames from all the Flashes.
- I prototyped the storyboarding approach on the (pretty short) Act 1 Flashes. These all have text descriptions.
- Because writing takes longer and can in principle be done by others, I'm now just choosing and arranging the keyframes.
- I wrote code to streamline the production process, so I should be able to make storyboards more regularly now.
- I implemented some CSS-based viewing modes to allow the same storyboard to be presented in different ways.
- How can I help?
- Firstly, do tell me about any mistakes! Secondly, do you feel like writing scene descriptions for the storyboards that don't yet have them? Please do! Maybe I can wire some kind of wiki-editing up if there's enough interest, but for now just send them to me like any other project help. Discuss how it should work first with me if you want.