RodianAngel

Photostories, for those who don’t know, are essentially comics put together with photos as opposed to drawings. They can be as simple as a few frames making up a one-two-punch joke, or as complicated as several installments of a series. For mine, I use Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls (BJDs for short) to represent my characters, but you can use whatever suits your fancy and your vision. This is the second and final part to the series and you can find the first here ->  How to Create Photostories, Part 1

The Situation:

Now we’re finally getting a bit more technical! Now that you know who your characters are, you get to decide what happens to them and what they do about it! Yay! I usually start with a very vague idea, honestly, when crafting my photostories. They’re just for fun and don’t follow large-scale story arcs. When I sit down to write my OC stories, between books, I spend months writing down the framework and all the details I can think of in a giant folder. Because logical continuity and consistency takes more effort!! But with my photostories, the springboard is usually: "Birthday party--go!" Sometimes, the idea turns into a multipart story spanning several finished pictures (because the file size would be too big if they were kept all together), and sometimes it’s just a short, funny little thing, a bit like a comic strip. An idea can be as ambitious as "A beach party that makes Prosper learn to enjoy life more" or as simple as "Meridian does Theorie’s nails." And as I said before, if your characters are developed enough, a story will build around them. All you need is a situation, and they will react accordingly. Does it sound crazy to treat your characters as human as I do? Maybe, but it’s darn effective.

-Setting:

Finally, some real technical stuff! My house is just so dark. No matter how hard I try to light it well, without professional equipment, my indoor photostories usually turn out partly grainy, so I prefer to do my photostories outside. For outside shoots, my general tips would be:

-Wait for a cloudy day. Too much sun can make for high contrast and ugly shadows.

-Wait for a windless day, for obvious reasons. Even if my BJDs are sitting/lying down and there’s no way for them to blow over, their hair can still fly up in front of their faces in the middle of shots, and that’s quite annoying.

-Do not set them up on concrete!! Just in case. I mean, resin does chip if it hits something hard! If you’re working with characters made out of a more durable material though, feel free to go wild and set them up anywhere you feel safe.

-Bring a friend who will help you carry things, or else stand by and make sure no one will make off with your dolls while you carry things to and from the car (if indeed you had to drive to a location).

-Make use of a very sturdy cardboard box (that won’t fall apart when you pick it up--BJDs can be heavier than you expect!) for transporting multiple dolls at once. Just be gentle!

-Invest in a tripod. My beach party photoshoot took 2 entire hours just to photograph, and my neck was killing me at the end of it. A tripod is indispensable, and mine was only $9.

-Make sure there are no small children or curious people or stray cats or loose dogs around, so you can photograph in peace. I’m not kidding. I didn’t even notice he had snuck up on my until I reviewed the shot. Then he proceeded to rub his face all over Prosper.

For inside shoots, you’ll probably want to personalize the area with as many props and lifelike touches as you can. You can tape tiny pictures to the walls for posters, make up a BJD-sized bed, use large jewelry organizers for wardrobes or dressers, construct couches or chairs, have some of their clothes lying around (if they’re messy pigs who don’t pick up after themselves, anyway), anything to scale that makes the area look ‘lived in’ or realistic, like the place you want it to be.

Open all the shades and curtains for the best natural light (I prefer natural light), or get all of your lighting supplies together (if you have any) and figure out which direction the light source should be shining from so as to best light your scene.

Finally, make sure everyone stays out of your way! I really can’t concentrate when there are cats running around pawing at my backdrops and falling asleep on my BJD furniture.

To see the difference between indoor/outdoor shoots, and sunny vs. cloudy, compare these:

-Storyboarding:

 In case you’re unfamiliar with it, storyboarding is a process in film and television where artists are given finished scripts, or portions of them, and draw up rough images depicting how the scene is going to look. Who’s going to be in each frame, what angle you’re shooting from, how long to hold the shot, etc.

The same goes for the still images in comics and manga, and photostories. You can sit down and draw it out beforehand if you like, but I generally think about which angle looks best while I’m shooting. I’ll take several shots from several angles and see which one I like best in the editing phase.

Angles of shots, dialogue, and the direction of the story sort of goes off all at the same time in my head while I’m shooting. During my beach photostory, I knew how it was going to end, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to get there, so I let my characters take over during the middle. For my snowball fight photostory, I had the theme ‘snowball fight’ in mind, but didn’t know anything else--who was going to win, what was going to happen, or even who was going to be on what team--until I already had all my dolls sitting around in the snow. Once it became clear that Prosper and Thackery made a better team than Rodya and Theorie, Rodya knew what he had to do in the face of losing….

You may prefer to have a better idea of how you want your story to go before you even pick up a camera, so feel free to write it down first, or even storyboard it on paper.

As for the general structure of a story, I refer you to the inimitable Blake Snyder and his "Save the Cat" books. The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet (or ‘BS2’) is law. How you interpret each imperative beat in your story is up to you. timstout.wordpress.com/story-s…

A few tips for shooting:

Editing:

Here comes the boring part! The part where I have all of my photos transferred to my computer, I know what bits of dialogue are going to go over which photo, I dump them all into one folder and sift through 100+ images and weed out the ones that aren’t up to snuff. Out of focus? Delete. Overexposed? Delete. Subject is not centered properly? Delete. Cat photo bombing in the background? Delete….

Once I have one good photo for every shot I need, I open a 1,000x10,000 (this size varies in length, but width is always 1,000) pixel file in Photoshop Elements 8, my photo editing program. You don’t have to have anything fancy to string the pictures together, though. You can even use Paint if you have to. You won’t be able to do any fancy editing, but you’ll have your pictures lined up and in order, and that’s what counts. You can even add speech balloons and text in Paint, just be very careful, since you can’t undo an action more than 3 times.

I enlarge my canvas as needed as I resize my photos to 1,000x667 and place them in order. I like to use a straight ‘one picture after another in descending order’ format, just because I fail at comic page layouts, and I don’t have enough energy to get good at it. This doesn’t mean that you should adopt my straightforward style though, if you already know (or would like to know) how to make effective, dynamic page layouts like those in comic books and manga.

Anyway, I keep each image separate on its own layer, and once they’re in order, I perform any minor edits as needed to sharpen, fix the exposure, etc. Usually, oddly enough, I have to brighten their eyes. Only Prosper’s eyes are always light enough. When I’m sure all the panels look good, I flatten the image.

I do text next, but I absolutely cannot give you any help about font. Somehow, trying to understand and choose a decent font is something just beyond my reach. But my most recent photostories are using ‘Mangaspeak,’ if you happen to see them and like the way it looks.

Once the text is in order, I use the shape tool and pull ovals into shape underneath the text. Then I flatten the text and speech balloons into one layer, above the layer of photos, and scoot them around as needed into empty spaces so they aren’t covering any faces or anything important. Then I take a 4 pixel round brush and sweep lines from the balloons toward the speakers. I use a Wacom medium tablet, so the line is very smooth and tapers at the end, but you can do it just as well with a mouse, too.

Save it, name it, give it a title image if you want to and add and ‘end’ sign at the end if you like, or even a ‘to be continued’ sign, and you have a photostory! Huzzah! Now people can get to know your characters in a way that goes beyond just sharing still photos of them!

Closing Remarks:

I did kind of end up phrasing it like ‘you should do it this way,’ but once again, everyone has a different style and my ideas should be followed only as you see fit.

Also, for those of you that only have one doll right now and don’t think a single character is interesting enough for a photostory, you really don’t need to have more than one character. My photostory "Making Christmas" has only one character, Liesel, and she doesn’t even talk. The story involves nothing more than her making a Christmas card and using too much glitter that eventually all falls off anyway because she didn’t use any glue. It doesn’t have to be a wonderfully exciting premise to be entertaining, or to display character.

One more thing! I also like to end with something funny or unexpected, like when Prosper took out his own eyes after seeing something horrifying (he is a BJD after all, so his eyes are naturally removable). In the spirit of that, here is a picture of Thackery and Prosper wearing (and holding) funny little lamb hats.

Have fun storytelling!!

     Photostories, for those who don’t know, are essentially comics put together with photos as opposed to drawings. They can be as simple as a few frames making up a one-two-punch joke, or as complicated as several installments of a series. For mine, I use Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls (BJDs for short) to represent my characters, but you can use whatever suits your fancy and your vision.
    I’m frequently asked for advice on how I put together my BJD photostories. Here is a step-by-step guide for the process I usually go through, and some tips! Feel free to pick and choose what advice you take away from it. My way may not be the best way for what you want to create, and everyone has their own style, but if you can find anything helpful here, great!

    There’s a lot to do before I pick up a camera…the first half of this guide has to do with characterization and developing the players in your story. Feel free to apply it to any sort of story you may be constructing, not just photostories. The second half will deal with the technical aspects.

Character:

     The first step I take is to create the characters. If you already know everything about the people whose stories you’ll be crafting, feel free to skip this part. It may just be me, but I choose my favorite stories based on what happens to whom rather than what happens overall. I’d rather watch my favorite characters sit around reading a dictionary than watch people I don’t care about go on the most fantastic adventure ever. If you have well-developed, grounded, likeable (or even hateful, when necessary) characters, your story will appear around them. Characters should guide events, events shouldn’t guide characters.
   My process for creating OCs is very different from my process for developing the character of a BJD. With an OC I decide what I want them to be like and what role I want them to fill in my story, I design their look around that, and then they gradually reveal even more about who they are the longer I write about them. With BJDs, I first order a sculpt that I’ve fallen in love with, get them home, see what looks good on them, what their style is, and get a general ‘feel’ for their personalities before I add them to my photostories. The appearance-personality setup happens backwards. This is not the general way BJD characters are created--most people have a story in mind already and search for a sculpt that looks like the character they’ve already designed, and this way is also very effective. It’s less of a gamble than mine. You can try what works best for you!
    Either way, there are several ways to develop your characters from there.

-Personality:

      Personalities are generally built on a combination of one’s history/circumstances, experiences, and predisposition. You should at least have a brief outline of your character's history, even if it doesn't factor into the story's present, so you can understand where they're coming from. The way a person was raised heavily defines who they are. However, even if they come from troubled beginnings, that doesn’t mean they have to remain troubled. They can be surprisingly well-adjusted. Even if they come from old money and a snobbish family, they can still be down-to-earth. This is generally due to experience + predisposition. They will react to different experiences in different ways. It’s up to you to decide how these puzzle pieces will fit together into who your character is now. Their new experiences will also shape who they will become.
     ‘Personality’ is such a broad term that attempts to encompass every facet of the way a character acts and thinks, so I’m going to break it down into a few more categories that will generally come up in the process of telling a story with them.

-Language:

 
     While it is entirely possible to do a perfectly wonderful photostory without a single spoken word, more often than not, your characters will have things they want to say. How do they say them? Are they soft-spoken, tacit, loquacious? Do they have a firm grasp of grammar, or do they speak broken English? Do they even speak English? Is slang a yes or a no for them? Are they more likely to say ‘gonna’ or ‘going to?’ Do they hesitate? Stutter? Beat around the bush when trying to get to the point? Do they feel comfortable interrupting people, or do they wait for their turn? Do they talk to themselves when they’re alone? Do they express their feelings more with words, body language, or expressions? Admittedly, expressions can be limited when working with BJDs or other static figures, but some slight digital manipulation can bring about effective changes. More on that later.
    These are all important things to consider when crafting your character. Once you understand how they speak, it will be something you won’t have to consciously think about. I can have someone pull a perfectly random sentence of dialogue from any of my own OC stories (different from my BJD photostories) and I can tell you who said it. The patterns of their speech and thought are incredibly distinctive to me, even if the readers don't notice them themselves.
     That being said, I’ve known these characters for going on 6 years, so don’t feel bad if you can’t do that yet, and think your speech patterns are no good or something.
     A method I like to use for new characters to make sure their speech patterns are distinctive enough is to ask them all the same question and see how different their answers are. For example: “Why do you wear your hair the way you do?”
    Their answers should reveal anything from personality, mindset, level of self-consciousness, how busy they are, how well they respond to being asked useless questions, or even several of these. I’ll use my OCs as opposed to my BJD characters, since I have more of them:

- “Um--heh, it just kinda goes that way.”
- “Um…it’s um…it’s easy to keep this way.”
- “It’s easy and it’s pretty!”
- “Huh. I don’t really think about it, I guess. Is facial hair included? Because I know why that is--it’s because I’m always missing things with the razor.”
- “*sigh* I was told my hair would no longer look too big for my head once I hit six foot-four. Evidently, that is not the case.”
- “…It hides my face from three angles.”
- “Oh, it’s um…it’s just the way I’ve always worn it, ever since I was little…I guess I should probably change it sometime….”
- “It goes well with my face, it’s long enough to try out lots of styles on, and Eizan likes it.”
- “…Well, my father finally crossed the line, didn’t he?”
- “Why? Don’t be stupid, how could that possibly make any difference to anybody?”
- “…I--I don’t have a choice!”
- “Because it’s fetching. And it’s natural.”

    Well now, some of their answers ended up revealing a bit too much. Or even confusing viewers by alluding vaguely to their past. But the point is, they’re all different answers because each character is coming from a different place!
    Anyway--on to the next segment!

-Style:

     It’s just a good idea to know what your character likes to wear. Otherwise, if they feel frumpy or uncool, they may refuse to pose correctly and your story will be ruined!!! This does not apply if you are using figurines or action figures, or anything else that does not allow for the changing of outfits. But as for what happened with my BJDs and their styles:
    Before my girl Theorie arrived, I assumed she would wear a lot of skirts, so I made her tons. They’re sitting unused in a box now, because she turned out to be a short-shorts girl instead. She also shuns the pastels I had planned, and loves bright colors.
    Prosper loves Superhero t-shirts, since he’s a comic book enthusiast. Most prominently, ones featuring Wolverine.
    Rodya prefers black and white as a color scheme, but often wears colors for his girlfriend’s (Theorie’s) sake, because she likes him in bright tones.
    Thackery tries as hard as he can to dress like a cool dude, but misses the mark entirely and ends up wearing the strangest colors and patterns. For example, a gray jacket covered in blue-and-yellow leopard spots, and a shirt sporting pink, blue and green sharks, and little hearts.
    Liesel is a toddler and dresses how others dress her, meaning she wears tiny jeans and cute flowery tops when her cousins dress her, and frills and rosy headbands and pretty little dresses when her ‘Auntie Theorie’ dresses her.
    Meridian is my newest girl, and she needs muted colors to go with her skin tone/hair so as to not overwhelm her. She also seems fond of tights so far, which is a good thing, considering her new shoes are just a tiny bit too big and putting on tights makes them fit better.
    It’s good to keep in mind too that not every character wears what they do because of choice, either. Maybe their family forces them into suits and ties when they’d prefer jeans and t-shirts, or maybe they’re too poor to afford the designer dresses they’d love. Maybe (like with Theorie and Rodya) they dress the way they do to please their boyfriend/girlfriend, or like Liesel, they are too young to choose their own wardrobe.

-Interaction:

 
     Once you know how your character thinks, speaks and acts, you should begin to develop how your characters feel about each other. However, keep in mind that the way they act toward somebody may not always reflect exactly how they feel about them. For example, politeness may interfere with someone treating a person they hate with contempt. Fear may keep them from treating the love of their life with affection.
    Here is a diagram of how 4 of my BJDs feel about each other, for example:




    If you remove even one of them, the dynamic changes. Before Thackery arrived, it was Rodya and Theorie against Prosper. Add in Prosper and Rodya’s little cousin, Liesel, and it becomes Rodya and Prosper against Theorie, who wants to dress up their cousin and ‘corrupt’ her with talk of One Direction and other things the 2 boys think are silly and useless. The 4 of them playing a board game together would play out one way, but add in Meridian, whom Thackery has a secret crush on, and suddenly Thackery’s manner becomes much more reserved, fidgety and nervous. Depending on how comfortable your character is meeting new people, and how self-confident they are, their demeanor will change depending on who they’re around and how well they know them, or how they feel about them.

-Trappings:

     This just has to do with odds and ends, likes and dislikes, the fun stuff. Does your character have an obsession? What music and movies do they like? What are their hobbies? Do they always wear a certain piece of jewelry for luck or sentiment? What are their quirks? Do they like to read? Play sports? Build ships in bottles!?! Do they need glasses? Do they wear them as a fashion statement anyway? Do they have any bad habits? Ask them!
    It took me two months to figure out what Thackery was like. He was shy, evidently. I thought he was going to be more like Rodya (which is probably what he would like people to believe, since he thinks Rodya is really cool), but he ended up being entirely different. Sometimes it takes a bit to get a character completely figured out. And then there are the truly odd ones…I have an OC I still haven’t been able to figure out much about, and four years after his creation I realized it was because he values himself only as he can be valued and put to use by others, so he doesn’t have much of a sense of self. Sometimes characters won’t fit in the box you designed for them, and that’s ok!
    Anyway, it’s a good idea to discover as much as you can about them, even bits of trivia, even if what you learn never comes up in a story. I knew for four years that one of my main OCs was terrified of needles, but there was never an occasion to mention it until last year. Making a list of interesting tidbits is very useful!

Stay tuned for part 2!

I am so excited!!!! Sometimes I feel kind of bad that all the dolls on my grail list (there are 3 left) are ones you see frequently, but it's not like I get to choose which sculpts I fall in love with. I've wanted an Unoa Lusis since 2010, and never thought I would be able to get one because, well, they're rather extremely hard to come by, and that makes them super expensive. Then--not to sound too Stephanie-Meyer-ish (seeing as how she claims her idea for Twilight came to her in a dream)--I actually had a dream that there was an Unoa Lusis for sale, but I had just blown my BJD fund on a blue-haired doll that I didn't even like, and I cried. When I woke up I decided to check the doa marketplace just for fun, and lo and behold, there she was!! The BJD equivalent of the car that was owned by a little old lady and only driven back and forth to church on Sundays! She'd barely been out of her box since 2008, no yellowing, no chipping, original box and papers (which was a must for me when recast Unoas are so rampant), seams already sanded, 1.5 body, original eyes and eye mechanism included with large or small bust option--and the seller would be making a trip to the US in early February and would ship her from there so as to eliminate customs! SHE WAS PERFECT!!! The seller said she was leaving the hobby and this doll was her last, and let her go at a price that was so reasonable, which just about floored me. If anyone's interested, she's Viru on doa, and I believe she still has 3 wigs, a pair of shoes, and a dress for sale (if she sets up a listing for them, I'm not positive she will). She was super nice throughout the whole transaction and kept me up-to-date with pictures before shipping, etc., and the entire experience was just so perfect and now I have lovely Meridian to make pretty, pretty MSD clothes for and who is so much more portable than my big heavy SDs, so she can come with me to loads of different photoshoot locations. It's just so exciting!!

It feels like I haven't been active in so long... Argh--I have almost 3,000 messages in my inbox and I'm way behind on responding to people. Sorry!! For those who don't know, I don't have internet at home besides what I can access via my phone, which isn't much, and it's been difficult to get to the library lately to use their computer. I did want to say though, thank you guys for all the birthday wishes!!! I'm 20 now, but I can apparently still pass for 12 because exactly 3 days before my birthday I was riding a shopping cart across a parking lot and a nice retiree chuckled at me and said, "Must be nice still bein' a kid." I didn't mention that I still play with dolls too....

Also, I wanted to point this out, because it's sort of hilarious--I had no idea when I named Rodya...I mean, I found his first name in Crime and Punishment and I gave him 'Angel' as his middle name because he was my first BJD and he was my little angel. X3 His name is also my username, so when I Googled it...this came up: www.facebook.com/rodian.angel