Morning Rabbits was a labor of love consisting of hundreds of people collaborating to bring you the finest picture story ever made with the most cutting edge technology available. The amazing thing is how all this talent, consisting of artists, engineers, gaffers, camera pointers, writers, scribblers, fortune tellers, forest rangers, road fixers, paper mache-ers, secretaries, kings, queens, serfs, skeptics, and nay-sayers was orchestrated to make the miracle of Morning Rabbits come to be on the big screen...yak, yak, yak...
Okay, I did it all myself, and it isn't on the big screen unless you have a large computer monitor. Just think, though, if all the above helped, what an amazing story it would have been! Instead, you got what only I could give you.
Well, that's not entirely true either. I used many tools to leverage the process, such as pencils, pens, paper, software, computer hardware, cafes, my car and my bike (to get me places to work on the story), and so on. People made those things. So, in a sense, they helped. Yet--without discounting what they have done for me in return for my cash--they weren't specifically trying to help me write a story. They don't even know me. So, I say, the story was my creation nevertheless.
Really, how was it done? Why bother telling you? I'll answer the second question first. I think that most people like to know how things are done. It makes the things done more interesting. I, for one, always watch the how-they-did-it's that come with movie DVD's. What I'm writing here is for the how-they-did-it afficionado.
Now, on to the first question of the above paragraph: Ever since I took a creative writing class in the late 1980's, I've loved writing stories. Picture stories have worked out well for me. I have an easy time coming up with them. I have a bunch that have not made it out of the rough stage. Until I got a laptop computer, my stories were first written on paper, since ideas always came when I was away from the computer, which was sitting on a desk or floor at home. I would use any paper: napkin, sketch book--whatever was available. Eventually, I scanned them into the computer for storage. I now basically use the laptop even for roughs, though I will use paper if it's more convenient. Morning Rabbits began back in 2000 on paper. I wrote the story and sketched out the pictures for, I think, about a month or two. Here's the first page of the original draft (on paper) and the first two pictures of the final story (done in Adobe Illustrator), for comparison:
First Draft
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Final Pictures
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When finished, I set the story aside.
One day, I was looking for a story to work up for the Web. I wanted it to be longer and better done than any I had done before. I decided that, from my collection, Morning Rabbits would be the one. Previous picture stories prior to The Ghosts Who Sought the Good Death were drawn by hand, scanned, and colored. I did The Ghosts Who Sought the Good Death with Adobe Illustrator. The vector graphics, being malleable and scalable, and looking slick, really appealed to me. I decided that Morning Rabbits would be done in Illustrator as well.
I estimated I would need to do about 50 pictures (I say "about" because though I knew from the rough pencil sketches what pictures I would be making, sometimes things change as you make revisions, including the amount of pictures you need in a picture story). So I did the math: if I did just one picture a day, it would take me at least 50 days! That seemed like a long time. I decided I would do it anyway. Trouble is, it was taking more than a day to do a picture. I wouldn't work the whole day on the pictures--just a few hours. I had other things to do. It only got worse. The pictures weren't getting done in a day. They were taking several days, even a week, or, sometimes, more. It occurred to me that my lack of experience with cartooning in Illustrator, and the fact that cartoons are more complex than they at first look, were the problems. Believe it or not, cartooning can be time consuming, if you are somewhat like me. I've seen people whip up complex art rather quickly, so I'm sure the experience is not universal. Such is life.
Okay, you're getting it...these pictures were going to take a long time to finish, and thus so would the final story. Well, I worked for some months this way. You know, though, that the longer something takes, the more chances there are for something to get in the way. So, things did. I even let the story sit a year. That's because I had to do the pictures on that home computer, and I couldn't always get home to do them.
Then along came the laptop I'd been saving up for. What a miracle! I wasn't obligated to be home to do my story! I still feel that way. I have nothing against home, but I can't always be there. The laptop really gives you more options to work, relative to desktop computers. My real problem now is to know not to spend too much time with it. Could be bad for your health to sit around for too long.
So, I got into the routine of working on Morning Rabbits every week day (almost) for a couple hours, at a few nearby cafe's. It took discipline. I began to realize that just having the freedom to do this wherever I wanted didn't necessarily give me the energy. Sometimes, I was too tired. i did it anyway. Somehow, somewhere, I learned that you can't let your feelings get in the way of progress for the big projects, or you will be forever finding excuses to put them off, and they won't get done.
I found I had to make changes to the story. This is typical, but I did a major rewrite of the end. In the old story, the rabbits searched for the purpose of morning in Europe, and they had to travel there. It just didn't seem rabbity enough (although Europe is really a rather rabbity place, being the land of the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus, which is in turn the origin of the typical domestic rabbit--I ensmartened myself about this partially via Wikipedia.com). The story didn't have a carrot patch either. I decided a carrot patch was necessary, and I wanted some typical American moonshine-making farmer to be in the story as well. It wasn't going to work just to change the setting. The original travel to Europe involved some inherently European story elements and they all had to be excised to make the new story work. I'll put Europe in some other story. Okay, Europe? "Ja, das ist gut. Wasever."
I did tons of fact checking. You'd think a made-up story like Morning Rabbits doesn't need to worry about accuracy, but I really wanted to make sure that, for instance, rabbits really could climb trees before I told you that. Fact checking can be a wearisome chore, but it is also a time of discovery. I learned things about rabbits, carrots, and such that I didn't know before.
I drank lots of coffee. Too much. I had to cut back to seven cups a day.
While working on Morning Rabbits, I would often go to the same cafe. It's a nice place--big and with free Internet access. Yet, I got sick of watching those old men there play chess day after day. It got so annoying. They play that fast chess where they make these quick moves and hit a turn-taking thing to say they are done making a move. Why couldn't they occasionally have a nice game of Go Fish, checkers, or do crossword puzzles? I know, they may have gotten sick of me making a rabbit story, but they weren't watching. I sure hope I don't wind up thinking chess is fun someday.
I found I have this habbit (I mean habit--I think writing the word rabbit too many times influenced me) of laughing out loud at a good idea or talking an idea out. People at the cafes would avoid me due to my strange behavior, so I stifle my ego now and sometimes people sit nearby.
One fine day, in the early part of June 2006, I finally finished the last picture. It was the end of an era, lasting three years. Or was it four? We'll call it three. To think I took four depresses me. It's something in between.
All the text and pictures needed gathering together now into a format suitable for public viewing. That's all. It was kind of a big "that's all", though. Exporting all the pictures into the JPEG format (a format good for viewing pictures on the Web in case you don't get into the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works, and couldn't care less for it than you care for knowing the format broadcast television uses to send pictures to your TV) took more time than you'd think. I would have to check sizes and quality. I must have tried this six or seven times before I realized that I needed to do it again and again some more. You know, when you do something for a long time, you get to a stage where you begin to make mountains of all the mole hills, and I would reject an exporting on the slightest problem that no one would notice except me.
Yet, I wasn't done. I had to proofread the story. Of course, I found tons of errors. Each read-through turned up more. Yet, you know, I've been doing such stuff for years now, so this was no surprise. Just another anticipated chore. On the bright side, I had some fun using the thesaurus to replace words I used too often or that were too dull. You should have been there. This is actually something entertaining to do when it's for a story in which the weirder the word, the better. The biggest problem with this is that I would be tempted to use words I found that you only read in, perhaps, something written three hundred years ago. I had to compromise being flowery with words to make the story readable, even to myself (I don't use all the big words I find in a thesaurus on a daily basis, and so my own writing can be unintelligible even to me if I over-use the thesaurus). The pictures needed proofing too. I left things out (even now, after reading the finished and posted story, I find a couple pictures still aren't perfect enough--maybe I'll get to them someday and put out a special edition on a 3-set DVD), and a few things were out of place or unclear or not beautiful enough or the wrong color. You know. This takes days. I spent a few weeks proofing.
It would get hot in that cafe during the summer. It wasn't well air conditioned and it was hotter in it than out of it on the swelteriest (yes, I made up that word) days. It's a great place to be in the winter--it has a fireplace, even. It's always warm unless the doors are thrown open by the staff bringing the chairs and tables in from outside, which brings a horridly chilly arctic draft in from the outside, but I'm talking about now, not then. Oh, do you wonder what happened to those men who play chess? Well, they were there tonight, playing chess. I left the place and went somewhere else to write this and do other things--not because of the men, but because I just felt like a different scene.
So, I finally finished making the public version of the story later in the summer. Proud I am of it. A huge achievement for me.
Thanks for reading this. I hope you enjoyed reading what it took for me to make Morning Rabbits. It was lots of fun, as I know the story will be for you.
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Conductus Productions: How Morning Rabbits Was Made
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