VR Sketches, Part One
Shaenon: Among the many things I can’t draw (circles, two-point perspective, gerbils that look like actual gerbils), technology of any kind ranks pretty darn high. And yet my cruel collaborator, one Jeffrey C. Wells, came up with a plotline involving virtual-reality gear. Is this fair? Is this right? I think not.
My first VR sketches, as you can see below, were sad and made people ashamed to know me.
It was all so pathetic that friends and loved ones stepped in to help me. My husband, Andrew Farago, tried his hand at a ton of VR designs, most of them influenced by 1980s G.I. Joe comics and/or the later years of Jack Kirby.
Although Andrew’s bottom sketch is the coolest tech-wise, I like the next-to-last one for capturing Nick’s charming personality and sense of style.
As it happened, comic-book artist Lea Hernandez was in town that weekend! She tried to help too.
Sadly, I continued to draw unfortunate VR gear. As the below sketch dramatizes, I rejected one of my designs after realizing it made Nick look like an evil squid from “Super Mario Brothers.”
More next Sunday…
Channing: I’m such a bastard to work with. For the record, this a slightly-edited sample from one of my written scripts:
The camera is pointed straight at Nick’s closed apartment door. It’s an unlovely, utilitarian, painted aluminum door which makes no bones about the fact that its primary purpose is to keep people from just waltzing into your pad and ganking your stuff. It’s not exactly high security, but it’s fairly sturdy and bears the wear marks of a score of tenants before Nick. The one concession to any sort of decoration is the slightly scrolling look of the apartment numbers screwed to the door’s metal surface. There’s just enough artistry to the numbers to create a sense of cognitive dissonance with the door itself; they are mildly fairytaleish numbers bolted to a decidedly non-fairytaleish door.
And then I go on for a while longer, too. This is about the freakin’ door, which we see for about one and a half panels. I don’t know how Shaenon stands it, but it probably builds her character as an artist or something.
Shaenon: That script was actually super easy to draw, because no matter how intricately you describe a door, it’s still a rectangle with a knob on it. (I left out the hard part of the script, which was a hand ringing the buzzer. Hands? Pah!) I like that Jeffrey went to such great lengths to describe the numbers on the door without at any point mentioning what the numbers were. I made my own selection.
Kid Zerhacker looks like some kind of tomboy techno-Magical Girl. I love it for how adorable it is. It would have given a totally different implication to Nick and everything about him had you gone with that design instead of his Young Adult design.