“Striking Sparks” — Page Twenty-Eight

Jun08
by Bob Forward on 2014-06-08 at 21:00
Chapter:

Ironically, this will likely result in a major boost to Breechlode’s album sales.

 

More below!

 

Bobservations

Falling From The Sky

 

Yes! I get to start stuffing effects into the artwork again!

This particular set of effects were created by hanging a miniature black-smoke-and-fire burst charge from an overhead cable and using the clear blue sky as a natural bluescreen.

Which was all fine except for the squirrel.

Before anyone gets upset, the squirrel was nowhere near the effect when it went off. But it did run afoul of my overhead cable.

Now, this overhead setup I had created by running one end of a hundred-foot length of parachute cord through an eyebolt atop my chimney, and using the handheld compressed air cannon (seen in a previous post about cleaning drains) to fire the other end into a treetop, attached to a weighted tennis ball.

It is worth mentioning that I was doubtful whether using the air cannon as a line launcher would work. But I coiled the thick black paracord on the ground, stuffed the tennis-ball end down the muzzle, aimed at the top of the tree, and fired. And God DAMN if the thing didn’t go sailing up past the top of the tree, reach the end of the cord length, jerk back on itself, and go whip-whip-whip around the topmost tree branch, just like in the movies. Totally awesome. I felt like Batman.

Anyway, I could raise and lower the line by feeding the excess through the eyebolt at the other end, pulling it taut or letting it have slack from the ground. But the paracord was pretty thick, and would show up in the shot. So I lowered the center down to where I could reach it, cut it, attached heavy stainless clips to either end, and replaced the center with fifteen feet of almost-invisible fishing monofilament.

Each time an effect would fire the fishing line would burn through, of course, but the clips were heavy enough to drop the line-ends down to where I could reach them and replace the monofilament.

So I got some shots, and then replaced the monofilament one more time and pulled the line back up into the sky again, to keep it out of the way.

But that night, I heard a wild animal screech, followed by a loud SPLASH, then more splashing and screaming. Ran outside to find:

That a squirrel had discovered the paracord in the tree and (the cable being thick enough for a squirrel to run on easily) had been bounding along it to reach the house — until it had unexpectedly found itself on fifteen feet of fishing monofilament instead. Struggled for grip, lost it, and fell thirty feet straight down into my swimming pool. As I came upon the scene, the squirrel was clambering out of the pool. Completely unhurt, of course; but soaking wet, absolutely furious, and swearing a blue streak in Skwirl.

It should be noted that Skwirl appears to be an excellent language for swearing in.

— Bob out

 

 Artists Notes:  Tossed the idea around a bit with Dad about the no sound effects thing… wasn’t just laziness on my part (although that’s a pretty good excuse in my book).  It’s typical to throw on a big “BOOM” graphic text to accompany artwork like that depicted on this page, but I felt it made it too comic-booky and less “real,” which is silly, since it IS a comic but I think you know what I mean.  Sometimes it’s called for and sometimes it isn’t.  

PS:  Fans of the Call of Duty video game franchise should mosy on over to my storyboarding website DigitalStoryboards.com and check out my latest blog post- about my cinematic cutscene storyboard  for the recent “Call of Duty: Extinction” game.   -Max