Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (4 page)

T
here aren’t many folks, geeky or not, who don’t love cartoons. Beyond the Sunday paper or
The New Yorker
, there are cartoons out there that have particular appeal for us geeks: Dork Tower, xkcd, or PvP Online. Reading them is fun, but as with most things, wouldn’t it be even more fun to try to create our own?

Maybe you or your kids have already had a good idea for a comic story line or comic characters of your own. Don’t worry if your drawing or graphics arts skills aren’t up to the task—this project will help you overcome that niggling deficiency. Instead of pen on paper, you can use the tools you’re familiar—even handy—with to create something visually distinctive, creative, and all your own.

The basic idea for this project is to use LEGO minifigs or other similar action figures or toys as your cartoon characters, photograph them rather than draw them, and then manipulate those images on your computer to create the comic. Before you actually get to photographing, you need to sort out the basic features of your project.

What’s your strip going to be about? Is it you and your kids, or some imaginary characters? I decided to base my strip on the amusing Twitter messages of well-known geeky writer/actor/dad Wil Wheaton. Wil has the habit of tweeting the imagined conversations he has with various programs on his computer (especially iTunes) or with his dog. Because of the character-length limitations of Twitter, these conversations often take on the form of quick scripts that I realized would fit perfectly into standard six- or nine-panel comic strips. You may decide to use amusing vignettes from everyday life, outrageous things your kids have said or done, or just about any other story that can be told in three to nine panels.

You need to make your characters by using some kind of action figure you can pose and modify depending upon the story you’re telling. To make Wil as a cartoon character for my project, I discovered a really easy idea: I turned to LEGO minifigs, the little people that come in many LEGO sets. Here’s how you can create your own characters:

Your kids can have fun crafting their own characters. You can also use minifigs for stock characters in your script. There are all kinds of minifigs available, so coming up with an astronaut or cowboy or law-enforcement officer is pretty easy.

It’s always a good idea to start a comic strip project by writing a quick script to break down each shot so you know exactly what figures you need and what pictures you’ll have to take. Even though the idea of this project is to avoid actual illustration, work with your child to sketch out a visualization of your idea, blocking out the shots and scribbling in the words or thought balloons you’ll need. This will help you figure out what kind of layout you want—how many panels, what size, and what relation to each other. And don’t forget that sometimes a panel with no words can be the funniest of all!

The setup you use for photographing your figures can be very simple and cheap, or very involved and expensive, depending upon how complex you want to get, and how polished a final product you want to create. Here are some tips:

Once you have your equipment set up, it’s time to take pictures—and plan on taking a lot of them. You’ll probably want to start out with some basic shots to test the lighting and exposure, and, while the auto settings on your camera may work well, you might want to consider using the manual settings to ensure that every picture you take has the same exposure and color balance, for continuity of look. I used an inexpensive DSLR mounted on a tripod, with a fairly slow shutter speed and a delay so I could hit the button and step back before the picture snapped, just to get things really sharp and well lit.

Use the script you worked out earlier to set up your scenes, but don’t skimp on taking pictures. Set up each scene a couple of ways, play with the blocking of your characters (where they are in relation to one another), and take a series of pictures with slight differences in stance, perspective, close-up, long shot, and so on. It’s always better to have multiple choices for each frame when you get to postproduction, rather than being unhappy with something and having to set up and shoot again.

And don’t worry much about the resolution of the images, either. You don’t need to be shooting in your camera’s RAW format here. A typical 3-megapixel resolution will do just fine, and you can fill your image basket with hundreds of shots to choose from when it comes time to start composing your strips.

Now comes the composition stage. If your child is younger, you can run the keyboard and s/he can act as artistic director. If your kid is older or very savvy with the technology, now’s your chance to step back and watch his imagination run wild.

You have a range of options available to you for actually building the strip: