Want to Write a Movie? Start by Writing a Comic Book. Find out how in today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
Connections between comic books and movies are tighter than you imagine. If you dream of writing a movie, you can learn the process by creating a comic book. If you want to turn your idea into a reality listen to today's episode of Serve No Master.
One big step in creating a script for movies is vision boards. Where you literally draw each scene and what happens in it. It's important to create vision boards because sometimes scripts can be unclear, or directors might have different interpretations of the scene than a scriptwriter. And if you think about vision boards are literally a comic book.
Learn more about the process of creating a comic book and using the experience to write a movie in today's episode.
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Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM171: Want to Write a Movie? Start by Writing a Comic Book appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
Want to Write a Movie? Start by Writing a Comic Book. Find out how in today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
Connections between comic books and movies are tighter than you imagine. If you dream of writing a movie, you can learn the process by creating a comic book. If you want to turn your idea into a reality listen to today's episode of Serve No Master.
One big step in creating a script for movies is vision boards. Where you literally draw each scene and what happens in it. It's important to create vision boards because sometimes scripts can be unclear, or directors might have different interpretations of the scene than a scriptwriter. And if you think about vision boards are literally a comic book.
Learn more about the process of creating a comic book and using the experience to write a movie in today's episode.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM171: Want to Write a Movie? Start by Writing a Comic Book appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
speaker 0: 0:00
If you want to write a movie start by writing a comic book. Find out how in today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by BlueHost, choosing the right hosting for your online business is critical. Blue host has reliable servers and beginner friendly, on board waiting for you at servenomasster.com/blue.
speaker 0: 0:15
Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.
speaker 0: 0:45
I never realized the connection between comic books and movies was so tight. And so I saw a documentary about Joe Dworsky director from the 1970's and how hard he tried to make the movie Dune. I very rarely mentioned documentary because I very rarely watch it, but this one was so fascinating. Dune was one of my favorite books as a child I read the whole series. I even read the continuation of the book, the son took over for the father, great science fiction series, which you know is the main genre that I read. And what I really found fascinating was that before he made the movie, he created a comic book that showed frame for frame, his vision for the movie and that got me fascinated with the connection between comic books and movies. And as I went through the process of creating the Serve No Master graphic novel, which I originally was gonna call the Serve No Master comic, I learned a whole lot about this process, and I would share everything with you that took me from idea to flourishing it. And now that graphic novels available on the shelves all around the world when creating a movie or a television show, a big part of the process is called story boarding. The story boarding is where you have little drawings of what's gonna happen now. Different directors and different writers use different amounts of story boarding and certain genres. It's more common than others, but the idea is very effective. It's that before you spend tons of money paying for film crews and everything. You haven't really drawn out what's gonna happen. See a script? Well, it's wonderful. You have to describe everything that's going to happen, and sometimes it's not really clear, especially when it comes to the shooting angles and where people are gonna be positioned. But you can show so much more information with the drawing. And as someone who grew up reading comic books, I was fascinated by this visual medium. So there's a great deal connection and I get into research. So, you know, I always start my research on Amazon, because it's the largest book store. So what I found fascinating is that they're so many openings in this genre. There's not a lot of people really going after the comic book space. There's not a lot of great, not picture comic books. I have read The Book of Five Rings Comic book. There was a series for a while that would take classic books and turn them into comic books, and honestly, they got a few things wrong. A few of the examples in their Book of Five Rings, a comic book didn't match. I read that book a lot of times. That's a book I talked about a lot by Miyamoto Musashi. I've read the fictionalized account of his life. I have read the comic books about you Yosaki Yojimbo, which is, rabbit version of the same character, I used to watch the cartoons like I do as a kid and you saw that rabbit came through time traveling episodes. He was based on the same character, Miyamoto Musashi. It was the most famous sword fighter. Japanese history never lost a battle, he wrote of book about his approach to warfare, which became the basis of my book. Breakthrough is all about the Five Rings, and so I'm really into that philosophy there because it's unique, right? Everyone's heard about the art of war, which is the Chinese book on warfare. Everyone has heard of no battle survives. First contact with the enemy, my class wits, it was a military general, Though most people don't enjoy his book, it's quite dry. And then, of course, this is something different. And so I was fascinated as I went through this experience, I started to really delve into something that is interesting and this difference and show me and tell me show me don't tell me is really hard to say. It's hard to explain so I'm gonna give you a really great example. Recently, this movie came out called, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn and people who love or hate that movie. For me, when a movie has a lot of voice over, that's a red flag that it's not a good movie. Nothing else matters, and that movie is about 40% voice over. You have to fill in the gaps and explain what's happening. That's a sign that they failed because voice overs almost never in the script usually voice over something they add in post. They create a whole movie that people watch ago. I can't tell what's happening, and so they add voice overs. This is how they add those big voices of the beginning of movies, and you often hear directors in the commentary saying, Oh, we didn't want this voice over. But the film studio felt like people couldn't understand the movie, so we had to set the scene and every single scene in birds of prey. They have to set up and explain what's happening that tells you there's a huge problem because you should be able to see from what's happening on the screen. Ah better example of this. One of the best examples of Show me not tell me is in the movie World War Z. Whether you love or hate, that movie doesn't matter. There's something amazing happens. They show Brad Pitt sitting in a car. He looks out the window and he sees a zombie tackle someone. And then the sound changes. They create that sound. That's the sound of silence. It was like, Whoa, what right? Like they run everything through a filter and you hear him going? 12345678 And the person on the floor who had just been attacked by zombie stands up. And now they're zombie. You never hear him say humans take eight seconds to turn into zombies because you don't need to because he saw it. The visualization in that moment of that movie is so good, because you can tell what's happening and you're right there with him. You almost don't even need the sound of him counting to know what's happening and reason that doesn't count his voice of us because he doesn't say what's happening. He just doesn't year. I'm thinking here I'm counting on his head and start counting right along with him because you get it. You know he's trying to see how long it takes. So that moment is the perfect example of show and tell is the opposite of exposition. And that's why that moment in that movie is so perfect. And lots of other movies do this. And if you think about it, how many times have you seen a movie and you wondered why I wasn't good or why weren't that engaged? If you look back, you'll notice that one of the signs that something's wrong with the movie is that there's way too much exhibition. Or there's a bunch of title cards in the beginning to set the tone. The exception, of course, to all those of Star Wars. But here's something interesting. My family all hates Star Wars. That's because their exposures all with the recent ones with all of like Episode 7, 8, 9 I recently downloaded, we're trying to watch Episode nine. I put it on. We had an HD, the whole thing, ready to go Within the 1st 5 minutes, my entire family had left the room. So you might say, Oh, that's the exception because that's the one that starts with the scroll. But actually, there was so much information that scroll I was like, Oh, boring. It's a massive amount of information to set the tone right. If you watch the original one episode for New Hope, word starts, it goes, Oh, the world's at war. Princess Leia is the only hope. Here's get ready for it, right? That's one thing. This one is like This person's going here. This person's dead, These people starting a battle. And actually, I think it was even more than the normal three paragraphs thing was four or five. So maybe even the modern exceptions started become the rule that when they have too much exposition or too much static, are beginning. It's not a good movie.
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So between seeing an opportunity in the Amazon marketplace in my fascination after seeing this documentary, I began to think about adapting Serve No Master in a comic book. I thought that would be so cool. It start up with the idea of I would love to see a comic book version of myself now. This was before the redesign of the website, which now has a bunch of comic book versions of myself and I went on a really long journey. And what I learned along the way is that an adaptation is not that easy. A lot of people don't like, the second call, I feel the Harry Potter remakes your call, but it's the 2nd 1 was like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them The 2nd 1 J. K. Rowling, wrote the script. A lot of people don't like that script. I don't know to me that both those movie the 1st 2 are kind of the same. They're both OK. Not great, but not terrible. But a lot of people really didn't like the 2nd 1 and maybe it's There's an example that people that are great authors not always create writers and they're a lot of people who write movies that I listen to and follow some of their podcast who are really good at adaptations. But I've never written anything original. That's okay because it's a specific skill. I believe adaptation is unique skill and as I went to this process, I made some mistakes along the way. The first mistake I made was trying to hire someone to make a comic book. If you ever look in the front page of a comic book, there's like 20 names because a lot of people go into that process. I listen to a really, really great interview on a podcast with the man who wrote the comic book. The coldest City might not be familiar with that, but it turned into a Charlotte's their own movie called Something Blonde. Not Concrete Blonde, but not neon blonde. But something like that. It's a Charlotte's thrown movie, which I've seen, and he told the whole story of how he went from Comic book into a movie. It was really, really interesting. I learned a lot, so I that's a great idea. It'll actually post a link to that episode in the comments below. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you've seen that movie, remember the Charlize Theron movie that I'm trying to think of, which I should have had in the notes below? Just push a thumbs up or leave a comment, let me know what movie I'm thinking of, and I'll leave a link to that podcast interview, which was really, really good. It was really, really great. Is he really explain the process? What I learned from that interview was that he writes a script, and then someone else comes in and turns that into a comic book. So he actually writes a script that looks a lot like a movie script. So the script, part writing com book is just like writing a movie. It's so close. I was really surprised when I got through this process. Once I first realized I had to split up, but I took down the first job and I said, I'm looking for someone to turn this book into a script, I hired somebody, did a fabulous job, such an amazing job. I was so excited by that story. He wrote out a script. It would say, Oh, this pages double pages And this page is one box. This page has three boxes, and he spoke this language that I don't speak what It was really, really great. And once I had that script and it took him several months went back and forth. You did summer processes get some really good ideas. If you go and grab a copy of the serve no master graphic novel, and I'll post a link below so that you can grab a copy, you can see it on Amazon and in other bookstores and sometimes have promotions right? Give it Away recently had a glitch with a live presentation for all the people that had problems connecting. I sent them copies of that to make it up for, because I want to get it out there. But I'm so excited by it, and what you'll notice is that it's in two parts. The first part is a story all about me. And then, as I was working with the adapter, the writer, he said, this is starting to look a little narcissistic. Every panel is a picture of you. How can we tell another story? We ended up interviewing five people who are followers and had success after reading serve no master. And then we created stories were vignettes like short one act plays about each of them telling their stories, and they were really, really great. They came out really wonderful, and that idea came from the comic book writer. That wasn't my idea. It was a really, really wonderful. Once he completed the process, it was the time to hired artists. Now there's actually a huge delay between these two events. I first started the process, I didn't know how much it was gonna cost and end up becoming quite an expensive proposition. So I put a lot of money to another part of the business and unfortunate had to push it aside, still focusing on getting this across the finish line. And then when I had money in the budget again for artists I hired an amazing artist went through a real process. Of course, the thing I learned is that he said it would take six weeks. It took almost six months to get everything done. Artists really take a long time, and I went through a lot of different ones. But the final product is amazing. Total process cost around $3000 which is really expensive, considering that you can get a entire book ghost written for about $800 get it turned around in less than a month. Several years and $3000 is a long investment.
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Next time I do, it'll be better when I learned. First of all is that there are a lot of parts that you could do yourself. There's some really great books, and I posted a link. System Resource is below this video and below this podcast episode to some amazing books on how to write comic books so you could actually learn that. I don't think it's a really hard skill. You just have to learn the structure first, see if you could do it learning. Oh, I have to write about how many different panels on the page the size of the panel, what type I think I have to include and as what the process the artist he didn't stick to. The original script is about 90% the original script. But sometimes he would draw something because, you know, this doesn't look right. Here's what the original person said. And here's what I think it looks better. So did make some modifications, and in the end we changed the final page a couple of times. The final message of the book as we went through a couple of different iterations and ideas before we hit on something perfect. So there is a little bit of room along the process. If you want to control the process. It's important. Understand why there was cost overrun for me. The first part of the process was that there are people who are so talented. Some of the people who applied for up to write the original script work for Marvel. They'd worked on some really big name comic books that even work on some of the movies, and so they have these massive levels of qualifications. I was like, Whoa, you're so overqualified. The guy ended up hiring really talented, but a little bit newer in the business, and everyone wrote a sample, and his was just like so good was a little more than I was expecting to pay, but it was totally worth it. In the end, we went through the whole process really good and then the same thing for the artist. The artist I hired during his application process did something really interesting. He sent me an entire page with several different drawings on because, you know, a lot of people could draw a comic book character. There's a really big difference seen doing that and doing a page in a comic book. And so I hired him, even though we've never been hired by any listen up work. Before I gave his first job, put all the money in escrow, went to town, and months and months later we got the book across the finish line and it came out looking really wonderful.
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Now, great question that you might be asking this point that Jonathan's is interesting, but what's a graphic novel? And that's a really good question, because it turns out I didn't know what it was. I've read a lot of things I thought were graphic novels, but they're not. So here's the difference. Comic book is almost always 24 pages long. I didn't know that until I did research until I heard this amazing interview with the coldest city. Additionally, a comic book is a series of stories that end in cliffhanger. So every 24 pages there's a cliffhanger that's the structure and that gets you to read the next issue. And sometimes it's a crossover cliffhanger, so their story arcs that might be five or six issues. What I read a lot in the past is like they put together a whole bunch of issues that taken entire story are and put it into a book that's a collection that's not technically a graphic novel. Graphic novel is a story that is maybe 1 250 pages of comic book and tells a single story with a long story arc. So it's not split up into small parts, and it doesn't have a bunch of cliffhangers along the way. So it's written in a slightly different way. Well, it's can be a significant different way, so the better. What they called a city, which is really wonderful got turned into a movie. He writes a single long story, which has the elements of like a fiction novel. Whereas comic books are much more like a television series, it's a great way to think of it. You talk about cliffhangers to talk about the television show 24 because that's the ultimate examples and ending cliffhangers. And that's what a comic book really is. A complex series of story arc is a bunch of episodes of 24. They keep having cliffhangers, so when I went through my journey, I had no idea what I was doing. But at the end, I finally came. Other product was probably just took too long. Hospital is expecting I didn't really know what I was going get into. But now, knowing when you go in you could be much more strategic and you can look at it go. Which part's gonna do? Which parts can I not do. You can create graphic novels where the drawings don't matter. I read plenty of comics that look like my kids drew them, but they're very funny or they use the same image over and over and over again. And there's really cool software out there. They can help you with this process, where you have a couple of baseline images and just add text, each one and you can create the entire thing that way.
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And what I want encourage you to do is take some time to look at the process and say, Do I want to learn how to write movies? If you want to learn how to write movies, this is a really great bridge because it's so hard to get a movie picked up. It's a massive, arduous process, and movie scripts are quite long. Books. Rob structurally 1/3 to 1/2 the size in my experience, and you could start by just writing cup of 24 pages. That's really manageable. You don't have to go to full gravity, will start with the comic book, and it will really help you to stretch your wings when it comes to block out pages describing how you want things to look. And then when you bring in an artist, you're doing 24 pages. It's way less expensive. Okay, you get 24 pages done, raging 100 - $130. You can get someone for less than $5 a page. Absolutely. Now, if you ask for color pages, the price obviously goes way up. So that's why my complex in black and white much easier to manage. Maybe the next version will do will be in color, but for now, black and white was enough because it would have tripled the cost. Color pages start around $15 and they could certainly go up there. People who charge $50 to $100 a page, that's if you're really going after the fiction market. Maybe you need to go down that path, but that's not how I do my work. That's not how I did it. I I try to be cost control I look for a really good talent that's early on in their cycle and not as heavily price. So you can look at these different parts and go OK. I want to learn how to write movies, and I listen to a movie right podcast. I'm very fascinated by the whole process. Writing with is how I help myself become a better writer. So I'm on that path with you and you hear all these stories about people who can never get him to read it. But it's a way to separate yourself and show that you could do something different way to test her wings. So then you, since the artist becomes back looking nothing like you expected, right? Well, then you know something's wrong. And guess what? It's so much easier to get friends, family and other people to read a comic book than it is to get people to read a script so could actually open some doors. There's some cool marking things you can do there that you kind of go into. How have my creative networking and marketing strategies? I'm sharing a little bit with you, but it all starts with this core idea of let's see if I can write something that someone else can visualize, because if you don't get it right in, the script of the Positioning is not right. If what's happening isn't clear, then it's hard to translate into a movie. And comic book is a much shorter cycle. There could be years between when you write a script and when you see someone acted out, I listen to a really interesting podcast. That's all about scripts that never made it to a table, read their scripts they got paid for. And then when the network said the final version, you know it never minds keep the money, we're not gonna make it. And it's 6 to 8 month process of creating a script, and they never even heard someone read it out loud, let alone seen people acted out. So this is a way that you can see in a really short about a time, how your work looks and it becomes a cool asset. I'm really excited, have the compliments. We actually think the book is really good. When I first read it, I almost cried because I wish I was a good a writer as the guy who wrote my comic book. I just I find it so engaging. Not everyone's gonna love it. Not ever know my team loves it, but for me it's something really wonderful. Was a journey that I did first cause I like to do new hard things, and then I can tell you about them so that you can then try them because there's a lot of opportunity out there. There's not a lot of competition. This mark is. A lot of people haven't figured it out yet. There's a couple of big players, right? There's like marble, DC comic books and a few other ones that put out they have all the stuff that even get made into movies. But then in the nonfiction spacing, the educational space and Children Kabuki. But there's a lot of opportunity, especially if you're going to be creative and really dig in and see what we're looking for. What's missing and you could find a space for yourself and it's something really, really cool. And when you do, please share with me post a link of your comic book below. I'll check it out. I would love to check it out, share with my audience. I want to see you go through this process. I want to see your successes. So please take a swing created combo, create a graphic novel, and I'll see you on the next episode.
speaker 0: 18:50
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to servenomaster.com/podcasts now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No Master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday.
speaker 0: 19:19
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