So we're very lucky to have Mark back with us.
He's going to be talking a little bit about the scripting process with us today.
So, Mark, you've done a lot of work for your own projects,
for established characters.
Where do you start with this whole thing?
>> You really have to find your way into the character,
whether it's something that you've created or whether it's an established
character that you're stepping into, you have to understand that character.
I'm not saying you have to know everything,
you don't spend a week of your life mining out every detail of that character's
history, but you have to know what that character wants,
what motivates that character, what he's afraid of, what his goals are.
You have to know all that before you know the story.
You have to be able to be able to put that character in any sort of situation and
just organically know how they would react in a way that makes sense for the story.
And that's, like I said, that's true whether or
not it's out of your own head or whether you're doing a Batman story.
You still have to know what the character wants and what's in his way.
It's true in any character because again, even the villains,
they're heroes on their own story, they believe they're doing the right thing.
So you have to get into that headset.
If you can do that, you can tell any kind of story you want.
>> So with a script, you're kind of,
usually you'd probably be working on a team with a couple other people, so
the script's really fundamental for getting your idea for
what happens on the page across when you're not actually doing the art.
But our art learners for
this course are actually creating a comic book all on their own.
Why even work on the script?
Why not just skip straight to the art?
>> If you're going to tell a joke shouldn't you know the punch line before
you start telling the joke?
It gives your whole apparatus structure to work in.
Look, a script no matter what, and I keep hammering this home,
it's a collaborative process.
because otherwise you may as well be doing stage plays or prose,
or writing poems or whatever.
If you're going to do comics it is a collaborative process.
You're working with an artist so that script is going to be malleable and
changeable and you're going to find new things about it.
You're going to want to twist and turn right up until the point where it
just it's out of your hands and it goes out to an audience.
But comic script is structure and it gives you a place to start.
Everybody then knows they're kind of on the same page of the story
they are telling.
And also, if you're going to make adjustments,
it's much easier to make adjustments in the script form, move this block and
copy here, change this line of dialog here than it is to make changes
once you've drawn nine panels out of your 16 panel grid.