Development: Pteraform scene extract

I’ve been thinking more recently about the context of this work and whilst I’ve tried to separate from the idea of a moving graphic novel it is none-the-less a piece of illustration that will be sat down to and watched. This work is about communication via images to tell a story and although I am aiming for that in the time I have there is no reason why this cannot go on to work alongside the spoken/written work in some form or the other. The best parallels I can draw for theme and tone is the more classical illustration books with paragraphs of text alongside large pictures. As my work contains motion and would need to viewed from a monitor, large amounts of text wouldn’t really work. Narration of this text might though and it’s something I would consider for this work as whole. I think it would work well alongside the more illustrative images I’m planning to create and an ideal and different way to tell a story.

To give a more descriptive account of this scene and an idea as to possible narration, I’ve lifted this out of the story. It’s a more detailed account of the start of this scene:

“The Slender and functional steel pillars reached higher than could be seen high into the dark cavernous hall. Some had given in, buckled and bent double under the building’s weight. What is this place? The grating cries of rivets and rusted bolts echo through the void. On the ground below haunting statues loiter, frozen awkwardly enough to have not been sculptured. They gaze vacantly through the darkness, there was nowhere and nothing to see. In pain, and in silence, their grotesque balance had them fall like dying men never to reach the ground. Pools of shallow water fed by incessant dripping hung around the base of these solid, palpable ghosts. The dank puddles glimmered across this landscape but reflected nothing. Only in one was there something.

The water rippled from weak breaths, distorting a reflected body, long hair snaked out and clung to Senna’s face. She lay on her side, torso twisted and her face pushed into the ground. Legs and feet were carelessly, awkwardly placed and twisted. It did not matter, she could barely feel them anyway. Why am I down here, she thought. All the this pain and depravity had to mean something. Why am I down here, she thought again. Her eyes told this story, open wide, they blinked with regular consistency; she couldn’t break this cycle of thought. Like an awful dream that clings on after you awake. Why am I here, she thought. Again. Concentrating in such a huge empty space, surrounded by nothing should be simple. No distractions. Humans though are not seldom creatures, they have needs beyond the animal instinctive. They understand their world in ways no other life can but in this emptiness, with nothing to interpret, would they think so different from an animal? But as humans know, to find the needle in the haystack – amidst all that straw, is to look for the glimmer of metal. In amongst this consuming blackness, Senna had to find that glimmer. She needed it to pierce through the dark space above her. It had mass this space and it was crushing her into the floor. Senna’s palms were flat on the ground as her arms, trembling under this immense weight, tried to lift her chest off of the damp floor. Gradually the deep rut between her shoulder blades levelled out as she pushed further from the ground. Her head hung down over the puddle, she couldn’t yet find the strength in her neck to lift it.

All her effort was being used to hold herself above the ground, she could do nothing but stare at her reflection. She started to focus and saw the tattoo around her eye, remembering what it stood for. She heard herself, from before – “This mark! This doesn’t stand for me, for disease, mutation or crimes. This, stands, for my shit life” and remembered why she said it. She saw herself in that dark water and found her resolve. Found her glimmer, her needle and she used it to pierce the heaving, crushing emptiness of the space above.

Senna stood up, defying in her mind at least, the weakness in her legs and back. Physically it showed, her knees bent inwards trembling as they held the weight her limp spine couldn’t. Gradually she asserted her presence as the mass of this unknown void condensed above and behind her. There was no hint of relief in her eyes, just supreme control over this massive power as she remembered where this was, and why she was here.”