I like to give the artist a bit of leeway as well. I'll put up one of my pages vs. the script to show how the process works on my end. Hopefully someone finds it helpful. How I first start is I make an outline of the plot (not going to post that here since it'd spoil my comic
) that I want to accomplish in the "issue", which is roughly close to how the pages break up. Since the artist is already aware of what the main characters look like here, I don't waste time describing them.
Issue 2 Page 1:
Panel 1 - Establishing shot of the city of Los Angeles. It’s a bright sunny day in the middle of the downtown streets from the perspective as if someone were looking down at about the fifth or sixth story up in the middle of the street. People are walking on the sidewalks and crossing the street horizontally before us, cars are stopped in traffic at a light. There are buildings on the left or right.
Panel 2: Cut to a long shot walking across the street with Johnny and Chloe holding hands. They’re in their civilian clothes, Chloe wearing some classy dress that’s cute. Chloe has a sizable handbag, but stylish. Johnny is in his typical suit. They should be very happy and smiling.
Panel 3: Zoomed into a mid shot on Johnny with his hand held by Chloe on one side. On the other side we have a woman who’s dodging the path of the two, on a cell phone and looking perturbed.
Panel 4: Close up of the woman, one hand held up to her ear with a cell phone, the other swinging a large purse like she’s going to clock Johnny with it.
Woman: “Watch where you’re going you piece of-“
Panel 5: Chloe has moved around quickly, holding her elbow up and blocking the purse from hitting Johnny in the face.
Chloe: What’s your problem?
SFX: Thud!
Panel 6: A big panel. A car (sedan type) is flying through the air over the three of their heads- having been thrown from off panel, and they’re all sort of frozen there like three deer in headlights, Chloe still holding her arm up but her eyes are shifted upward with a little “oooh” face. Johnny looks similarly perplexed, as does the woman.
Panel 7: The car crashing up against the wall of a building, it’s crunched on the front against the wall. Windshield is shattering.
SFX: KRRAASSSH!!!
As you can see, I give enough detail to communicate what's going on, but allow the penciller/inker to use his own talent to make it interesting. Sometimes it gets tweaked to make the page more interesting looking as well. I get rough layouts back, make comments, then pencils, make comments, then inks. At that point it goes to my colorist who usually asks things like "hey, what color do you want her dress to be?" if I haven't defined it. In this instance i said I didn't care, just something feminine. If it matters to the story, I define it, if not, I try to leave it open so I'm not overbearing on other people's work.
Once I get the colored page back, I letter the content myself, so I do a dialogue revision both to help the story flow based on what I see, and to make the story stronger in general. Since I letter my own work, I have that liberty to toy with what the words look like on the page, which is very nice.
Moral of the story: changes happen, sometimes big ones in between the script and the art, but scripting things out really helps to create a refined product. The more revision that is done both in the art and in the dialogue, the better the work ends up. The final page is below:
For Script Frenzy, I intend to get myself a good couple issues ahead for the comic here, and then finish out my 100 pages by working on something else, probably a short film project.
