Lego Comic panel remake – Teleporting Amida

It is time for remakes! Over the years, my experience in creating Lego comics has grown somewhat and it’s already been over five years ago since the first episodes of the Foolish Lego comic were published. That’s five years of experimenting and creating my brick comic by trial and error. Many times before I’ve written about how I would’ve liked to have written the story differently. And of course, in hindsight, there were more aspects in the comic that could’ve been better than they were back then. However, I have to start with something and that is a recreation of some of the comic panels.

When I started the comic, I mostly concentrated on the quality of photography. So, as long as everything was in the frame, I was happy. Nowadays, there are other things I consider too, each time I shoot a photo for one of the panels. This year I will take a look at past episodes and try to improve some of the individual panels. This will be within the context of the story up until that point and, of course, within the, relatively unimaginative, four-panel-formatting.

Teleporting Amida – the original image

Below is the third panel from the second episode of the first chapter of the Foolish Lego comic: “Thief!” (Figure 1). It was published August 17th 2013.

The original image – positives

Barry and Darryl have just met, when a woman (Amida) steals a document from Barry. Our two protagonists chase her until she runs around a corner and vanishes into thin air. I like the fact that it looks like a sunny day and, considering my photoshop skills in those days, the teleport-effect is not too bad. For some reason i am also fond of the white stripe on the window/ door behind Amida. Finally, i like my use of depth of field. It puts the focus on Amida and shows that Barry and Darryl are behind a little.

The original image – room for improvement

First off, the little things! There’s dust (!) on the tiles, the flower is crooked and even the background is a little tilted. That last part would not have been a problem if it wasn’t by mistake. If it was intentional I should have made the tilt more clear to create a Dutch tilt, thus conveying a sense of ‘uneasiness’. Also, everybody’s happy, I did not pay any attention to everyone’s facial expressions. Even though I kind of like the transportation-effect in itself, it is a little out there. The colors have no meaning (and they look like the colors – red, yellow, green, of carnaval in my city Maastricht). Furthermore, the composition is a bit boring and misses tension. All in all, I don’t believe it’s too bad, but there is some room for improvement.

Teleporting Amida – the remake

Figure 2 shows the remake of the teleporting Amida panel. I changed quite a few things.

The premise

A significant change is that I wanted to show that Barry and Darryl actually saw Amida dissolve. I always felt that the reason for those to going to the antique-shop were a bit weak, and actually seeing the thief mysteriously disappearing might’ve been a stronger incentive to seek an explanation at the shop.

Composition

One of the main changes I made is in the composition. I used a low angle shot to make Amida look strong and powerful. Because of this angle Barry and Darryl sink into the ground a little because they’re a bit further away. This dwarfs them somewhat compared to Amida, adding to her current dominance (it also makes the flowerpot look smaller, which is annoyingly large in the original image). Combined with the depth of field, and the space Amida gets in the frame, she is undeniably the main focus of this panel. Also I tried to balance the composition a bit more by, amongst other things, using the Fibonacci-spiral (Figure 3).

The teleportation-effect

Obviously, I changed the teleportation-effect. Simply by making it ook a bit more spectacular and coherent, besides making Amida float in the air a little. In the original panel it was not immediately clear that she was disappearing, so I added a dissolving effect in the remake.

Color

There is a distinct difference in color within the panel. On the left we see Darryl and Barry, stil in their own, golden-yellow, warm, sunny world. As opposed to Amida bathing in blue. Blue is seen as cold; conveying contrast in their current worlds/ thoughts. Even so, blue is also the color of tranquility and faith. And red is not used within this image… maybe she is less violent and/ or evil than Barry and Darryl might think at the moment?

The little things

The facial expressions are different, a yelling Darryl, a stunned Barry and a relieved-that-it-worked Amida. The specially observant readers might notice the glowing blue necklace; might that be the transportation-device?

In conclusion

The remake would (mostly subconsciously) have brought much more emotion and tension to the story, besides conveying more visual information and possibly even questions. Usually I don’t have the time to think about panels this way, however, recreating this panel was a real eye-opener to me, mainly because it all came together relatively easy. Next time a new panel. For now, thanks for reading.