How It's Made: The Ferrywoman - 5

Here's the next installment of How It's Made. Let's take a look at the pencils for page five of The Ferrywoman:

I wanted Houyi to reference the wolf shrine that was portrayed early on in The Rabbit and the Moon. The wolf shrine is actually an old Yayoi era, ancient Japanese shrine house. If you check out the related articles, I've included a link to the original Timelapse for painting that page of the webcomic. The Yayoi Shrine was one of the first things I modeled in Blender. Previously, I would have rendered out the image for use in the comic, but it's a time consuming process. It's basically a really complex block model, and I don't think taking hours to render it in Blender Cycles is worthwhile. In the final drawing you'd never see the 3D model anyway. This time I just put the camera where I wanted it and then took a screen shot and imported it into Manga Studio and scaled it to the right size for the frame. I also used a side shot for the schematic of the shrine.

Why a Yayoi era shrine? You can read more about the Yayoi era in ancient Japan on Wikipedia. When I did my initial research for the Rabbit and the Moon, the story started with Houyi in the ancient era. I dressed Houyi as a Han Dynasty warrior, and the corresponding time period in Japan was the Yayoi era -- give or take a century or so. I had to fudge it a bit, so it's not historically accurate to a 'T', but it's good enough to support the story I'm trying to tell and hopefully give it some semblance of history and realism that I wanted to infuse Mortal Coil's storytelling with.

Storyboard

 

Script

TACHIBANA Deep in the mountains, under the wolf's shrine, we have buried supplies to re-capture and seal the demon. Even after the wolf feasted on me, he was no stronger. The capture should be easy but you'd need a priest. KAMIKO Back to square one. That doesn't solve anything far as I'm concerned. FERRYWOMAN Then, god child, you would need a miracle and nothing less. JADE HA! This god child will produce a miracle? Completely undependable! Frame. Kamiko pouts in the last frame (chibi, small frame)