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4 Episodes + 1 Behind-the-Scenes special feature + 1 slick Cover = one hell of an IFDB entry. 
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HAWKEYE: My Life As A Weapon Motion Comic Series
- Thread starter NFBisms
- Start date
- Messages
- 64
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- 38
Here are some extra motion comics tangentially related to this series:
Since we had some free time left over the course of working on this, me and the cast adapted one of my favorite short Spider-Man stories and gave our Hawkeye series a little flashback-prequel thing. Figured why not, we were all hanging out on the server and I had time so
.
Here's a link to a playlist of the main series.
________________________________________
I wanted to talk about some behind the scenes for this series overall though, just kind of as a debrief for myself - hopefully you'll find any of it mildly interesting! The spirit FE.org right? Talking about projects and ideas in depth is why I loved reading through these boards.
(Also, our commentary together ended up being too goofy and personal than anything educational or broadly insightful. LMAO)
Origins
I read Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run when it first came out and fell in love with it immediately. It was so different for superhero books - as far as I had read at the time - grounded, cinematic, and almost... mundane. The art style was minimal but gorgeous. It felt like reading an indie title, and I think it demonstrated to me the potential of superhero stories to be about more than just action-driven plots and climactic events (There's a lot more of this stuff than I thought then!) I loved how Hawkeye was a character study of a flawed and also relatively unpopular character. It took the lame factor and perceived uselessness of Hawkeye and turned it into complex vulnerability, addressing it as a point of character without rebooting or nullifying his history. I would never stop thinking about a possible adaptation of it and all its fun idiosyncrasies.
Come 2019, I felt the MCU had really dropped the ball with Hawkeye and I couldn't see them making a faithful adaptation even in the future. I don't think they ever knew what to do with the character, or ever levelled with the comic version for inspiration. First Whedon gives him a family in AoU, then he's void of depth up to the point they decide to turn him into a serial killer vigilante in Endgame. His one trait was "family" and Renner was all too dry in the role. This stoic and conservative nuclear family-oriented government agent was a far cry from the messy hotheaded rebel I knew from the comics. It's a little dumb, but I knew I wanted to introduce people to the Hawkeye I loved and that's where this started. 2019, I loaded up Photoshop and went to work dissecting the first issue for animate-able assets.
Casting Clint
A huge part of this was finding a perfect lead. Enter ProjectAlpha22, who while sounding too young naturally, was capable of doing some pretty damn good impressions of Steve Blum, and that's why I pitched it to him. He'd done TOM and Spike Spiegel in other fan projects, and while that wasn't exactly what I was looking for, I felt confident we could work together to find something adjacent as a baseline for Clint's voice from there. I never seriously considered anyone else, despite him not coming with a usable approach.
We landed on something akin to Matt Mercer's Jotaro Kujo from Jojo's, an impression he could do that wasn't half bad. And since we weren't even doing that specific character, it was perfect as a new voice for another. Something discussed here was how the material in isolation doesn't actually demonstrate that Cool Guy™ quality. Fraction's Clint is dominantly on the "depressed, exhausted" side throughout the run, so direction ended up being important for Alpha to learn the character overall. The base voice needed to imply a snarky, roguish element to communicate even for new audiences, that this was Hawkeye in fresh-for-the-character circumstances.
It ended up being a lot of fun to work with each other. Alpha's comedic background allowed him to really pitch in to the humor inherent in Clint's vulnerability, and the youthfulness peeking through the performed maturity added to the Man Child elements of the character. But most of all, I ended up making another Hawkeye fan and friend!
Casting the Russians and Other Extras (+Production Hiatus During 2020)
Burn The Night as Ivan and the goons was probably the first person cast on the project, and I was very lucky for that. Not only was he a really dedicated performer, he was also a genuine Russian! He would improvise and ad lib a lot of cool/funny stuff, and sneak in plenty of real slavic phrases. Additionally, he took on a role as producer (rejecting to be credited as such sadly), taking it upon himself to involve other Russian voice actors he knew to lend their voices to the project. This is how we got Vladibear as the elder Tracksuit Boss, and SirSunMan as additional bros. It was very cool to have that authenticity on this dumb project, especially when I was expecting to get, at best, maybe cartoon-y caricature voices.
I was so grateful for that help, but he also probably singlehandedly saved the project by checking in throughout all of 2020. I actually almost ended the entire project then (only had a fourth of the first issue by my winter 2019 graduation), especially after the lockdowns had me dealing with other things in my life. I would have forgotten about this, but Burns always messaged me and kept the group chat active through all that time. I eventually came back to finish the first episode and when we saw that we had something, we decided we could do more. I wasn't about to throw away the production pipeline I figured out for the first issue, of course I wanted to utilize it some more. Burn the Night consistently pushed us to finish what we started. (Or at least find the endpoint)
Casting Kate
Arguably, Kate would make or break this, even if Clint was great. The Hawkeyes' relationship is the heart of this run and I had to get this as right as I did Clint. I approached ShadowGamingVA, an incredibly talented voice actor in the MCRP community, and she was a perfect fit. She naturally sounded youthful enough to play as younger than Alpha's Clint, but had a lot of charming energy that was very Kate Bishop.
She too knew very little about her character but the confidence and sass was an easy entry point for her. My direction was mostly just getting ahead of her possibly reading Kate as too cocky and flippant, something I felt would be the obvious place to go with the material. And it has been easy for some Hawkeye fanbases to interpret Kate and Clint's relationship as a caricature of itself - (Kate as the smart straight man to Clint as a doofus). So I wanted the different nuances to come through in their performed chemistry where it might not in the words alone. Shadow very smartly keyed into some vulnerability and a sense of genuine care for Clint where she could. By the end, I felt she understood Kate better than I did, turning in some reads I never could have directed or expected.
I couldn't have asked for a better Kate, and such a good supportive friend to have around. We ended up doing those extra Kate centric videos because she loved playing her so much.
Technicals, I Guess
Animating really was just a matter of dissecting each panel into layers on Photoshop, and using a combination of Content Aware Fill and my own drawing "abilities" to fill in whatever was left over. Then keyframes on Vegas would take each shot to its endpoint. I didn't get too ambitious with it, especially at first - out of lack of patience but also wanting to preserve what made Aja's storyboarding special. At the end of the day, I just had to find a pipeline that was reasonable enough that I could put more than half an episode out a year.
That first issue is particularly more restrained than the rest though, and you might notice there that I actually approached each overviewing "shot" as its own background to move the assets across. Speech bubbles, the different types of debris, and various limbs could stick out from and escape panels; every asset was on the timeline at once per grouping. This is different from later episodes, where each panel had its own sequence. I played around with that approach a bit in episode 2, and by 3 I was working entirely that way. The timelines became easier to handle, which afforded for more complexity and dynamic "camera" movement. I mention this to note how much of a learning process this was. It's very duh-doy, but I was basically just winging it at first.
The font parroting the style of the comic was created from screenshotting the book's credits as much as I could and using font-creation software to make a custom font. Which is why it might look a little janky, with each letter not uniformly aligned. It was close enough for me and it's not like I'm getting paid for these details so
Stylistic Influences and Inspirations, Score
I always knew what kind of "cinematic style" I wanted for this. David Aja's art and Matt Hollingsworth's colors were very retro in design philosophy and I looked to the 70's for what it would sound like, how it would be paced, and what I needed to evoke. Lots of that era's soul, jazz, funk, Lalo Schifrin scores, etc. And that's without addressing how much Clint Barton is the archetypal "cowboy" in an ensemble. Spaghetti westerns would inform plenty of my sound design choices, and by that Italian tangent, the sounds and music of giallo cinema felt appropriate to utilize for moments of peril or intrigue.
I would also be lying if I didn't say Cowboy Bebop didn't influence me a bit, if only as a blueprint for how to borrow from inspirations and make the end product its own thing. I never used a CB track outright or anything like that, but I had locked into Yoko Kanno and Shinichiro Watanabe's scoring language and used that to guide me.
Antonio Sánchez's work on Birdman played an interesting and unexpected role here as the ideal aural aesthetic. I felt like there was a correlation between how its posters and promotional art looked relative to Aja's work, the shared more grounded NYC setting, as well as relevant thematic interplay with the superhero film genre. I found that it just fit with the 70s New York I was already trying to evoke here and ended up looking for more drum fills as a musical motif as we went along. Kind of monkey-brain association, but I liked it. I decided to just straight up borrow from it for the first episode.
Aja's personal soundtrack for the book at the back of the omnibus was also a helpful resource, and aligned pretty broadly with my ideas for the soundtrack. I wish I had looked to it sooner in the process for more inspiration - but overall I'm glad he ended up approving as you'll see in the tweet I posted in this thread.
Interesting notes, I guess:
Episode 3 uses sound effects pulled straight out of Bullitt. A quintessential 70s car chase was the perfect reference here, and I do love the sound design of that sequence. Additionally, video game car engine sounds and even a recording of a real '70 Challenger made it into that episode. Probably the longest, most involved foley process of all the episodes. (And it got covered mostly by music haha)
Episode 4 as a Christmas episode was one where I used music as more diegetic to evoke that Holiday spirit. I also felt like referencing Vince Guaraldi trio of Charlie Brown fame was perfect for the art style and melancholic vibe of the whole thing. Mercy Mercy Me by Marvin Gaye as the closer might feel a bit random, and for the most part - yeah - but those little jingles in the wind up felt Christmas-y in this context, and the bittersweet nature of it all just played well with the note we wanted to end the series on. It's also a song that means a lot to Alpha.
Overall, the score did a lot for the tone, as eclectic as it could be - but I should note that I also wanted to leave lots of white noise and room tone with no music for most scenes. Something that stands out to me about a lot of modern filmmaking is that there is a lot of background music on top of even the most mundane of scenes. I felt like that would be a cheap way to inject this with an illusion of life; I wanted the performances and my editing to speak for itself. That mode of storytelling felt more "vintage" - not using the music as a crutch and letting scenes play out. Usually this would be a no brainer but I was making the soundscape and everything from scratch.
Adaptation and Creative License
With adapting from one medium to the next, you have to give and take a few things. These aren't 1:1 with the original issues, for a myriad of reasons. I took some creative liberties in presenting the plots and characters to maximize the audience's understanding of and connection to the characters, as well as try to keep their attention by keeping the typically drawn out exposition to a minimum. Here are some (not all) examples of things I changed from the source and reasons why...
Before and after frames to give the illusion of animation was pretty commonplace. The money bag and door in episode 1, pre and post punch Clint faces in episode 2, goons before and after being hit throughout, etc. As fluid as Aja's storyboards were, I felt some things could be added to give these motion comics more "motion." Drawing over the panels with new material was also something I didn't shy away from for directorial reasons. In episode 2, I added a radio for Clint to fiddle with to lead us into the scene transition music.
Episode 4, I made up the whole 'Avengers' sequence with Spider-Man and Wolverine, as there was only one real frame of that battle before the comic moves on. "Down Here On The Ground" by Lalo Schifrin was such a perfect track - heroic Avengers-esque triumph interplaying with the scrappier offbeat jazz fills - I pretty much knew I wanted that reflected in the sequence, panning back and forth between Spidey/Wolverine kicking ass and a tired Clint. I had to draw that tired Clint asset myself, as well as Spidey's flip.
I also took the titles for each issue and put them as the end-of-video title drops.
Which meant removing them from their neat integrations at the start of the issue, sadly.
And these are just a few examples. But I hope it shows the directorial and creative affordances to actually cutting out assets and animating to the edit, rather than just the glorified slideshow we could have done in less time. Figuring out when and where I could use the language of film to more effectively tell the story was the perfect marriage of my passion for production and comics. Rule of thirds, handheld camera effects, shrinks and zooms as pans, speech bubbles popping up with the pace of the conversations, expressions allowed to have their own beats, etc. Just being able to utilize these "cinematic techniques" - I had so much fun, even if it wasn't fully animated or super flashy or anything like that.
Things I Don't Like About The Project
Of course, there are also things I wish I had done better. You're always your own worst critic, but I actually decided not to criticize myself too much throughout this just to get through a day*. It would have driven me crazy if I had been as discerning as I could be. I had to let go of small things to keep the project moving, others were relying on me! I'm grateful we set up deadlines, but man do I wish I had done some things differently now.
For starters, every "main" episode in My Life As A Weapon was created from relatively low quality jpeg scans of the book. This is because I initially started this on a laptop that could barely do anything on, and having these images to work with played better with that equipment. The smaller screen also certainly made it easier to ignore. I didn't notice much quality difference until I got my new set up. Which, once I did, was crushed to find out the difference. But by that point I had already done a lot of work I didn't want to redo, and it's not like anyone seemed to notice in the first two episodes. And again, not getting paid so
The sound mixing is inconsistent and generally pretty bad across all the episodes. I'm not a sound mixer nor do I have the equipment to do that great of a job. The way everything was set up in the project also made it really hard to go back and adjust levels. And at a certain point, when no one notices or brings it up, it just doesn't seem worth it to try harder than I did. (That isn't to say I didn't at least try to do the bare minimum) I had to keep reminding myself that these are just random no-budget videos on YouTube. As long as the important creative elements come across, technical quality stopped mattering. I treated these like slightly more produced storyboards/animatics, essentially.
A lot of my fills and drawing in the first issue are pretty garbage, since I didn't have access to a tablet then.
If I could go back and take a little more time with these, I would.
The pixelated jpg "HAWKEYE" in the LA issue will haunt me forever though
Bonus Videos
The bonus videos were a fun extension of our time together, and we'll probably continue to do some more when we find the time. We could have done more My Life As A Weapon, but it's pretty linear from the point we stopped, and doing one would have driven me to commit to literally the rest of the run. No one has time for that. So these one-shots were a good compromise to keep working together just a little longer. Basically treating every video like it's the last one prevents burn out.
LA Woman or "How To Be A Private Detective in California" was a fun showcase for Shadow carrying a video by herself. She's really charismatic and I thought she deserved her own thing to showcase that as Kate. I actually tried to differentiate the score for this from the previous Clint-centric, Aja-drawn series. More contemporary jazz, as well as some music from film scores influenced by the 70s but not from it itself. Nice Guys, Ocean's, etc. Using ABBA as more emblematic of the next decade's pop music. I felt like that was appropriate for the "second generation" Hawkeye. I indulged a bit in some Sinatra at the end though, and even snuck in a musical reference to The Long Goodbye since I feel like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow was explicitly who Cat Food Man was a reference to. As part of a longer arc in the run, I also had to excise much of the Madame Masque plot that makes Cat Food Man make any sense. But I kinda liked him as a random, mysterious stranger for this one-shot.
The Spider-Man/Wolverine video is one of my favorite short stories in Marvel comics, so when I knew I had a Spidey and Wolverine that liked working with me, this was inevitable. We took it up in the gap between episodes 3 and 4 when Alpha was too busy with college to record as Clint. Perfectly small scale enough to fill in that production lull. I think it turned out quite well!
The prequel Young Avengers issue is not one I have a ton of love for, mostly because the Eli/Kate romance falls so incredibly flat for me, but I think as a meeting between Hawkeyes, this absolutely captures the ethos that makes them worth a look. It's defiance. Defiance to be a hero in the face of authority or even their own very human vulnerability. I love that Kate doesn't really idolize him or the other Avengers, she's striving to do better, to spite them as a complacent institution. I love that Clint supports and believes in her and her friends right off the bat, because he sees himself in their hope and rebellion. That he encourages that fire in her. If Spider-Man's thing is Responsibility, this was Hawkeye's.
This actually came about around halfway through the airing of the D+ show, when I realized that the MCU had no interest in any of this. They basically just used Clint and Kate to fill in the archetypal template of grumpy mentor/lively mentee; turning their anti-gentrification narrative into a messy Christmas murder mystery for some reason. This was our response "preserving" the Hawkeye ideology to the wider audience we've been able to tap into, in the face of an MCU that didn't care enough about the character(s) to do them justice.
Stylistically, the attitude of the video is all different. Alt pop/rock I felt fit the vibe of young, rebellious teenagers. A bit less Birdman and more the CW.
I also cut and changed a lot to make Eli and Kate's relationship work a bit more. There's an entire page of his Nice Guy ranting removed, and I purposely edited Tommy to be more of a bad date to make Eli look a little better. And then I added an extra line in the last scene to more closely tie Kate's kiss to Clint's lesson about "taking the shot" as opposed to anything Eli earned. Additionally, I took some creative liberties and gave Eli's last line to Kate, to tie our entire series together and ground it more in Hawkeye stuff than Young Avengers.
______________________________________
Anyway, yeah. That's a long read. I don't expect anyone to get through it all, but it was nice to discuss this somewhere and leave it up for anyone interested in the creative process. I probably make it sound more involved and organized than it probably was, but these are genuine articulations of what I was thinking about when putting this together. Hope you find it mildly interesting.
Since we had some free time left over the course of working on this, me and the cast adapted one of my favorite short Spider-Man stories and gave our Hawkeye series a little flashback-prequel thing. Figured why not, we were all hanging out on the server and I had time so
.Here's a link to a playlist of the main series.
________________________________________
I wanted to talk about some behind the scenes for this series overall though, just kind of as a debrief for myself - hopefully you'll find any of it mildly interesting! The spirit FE.org right? Talking about projects and ideas in depth is why I loved reading through these boards.
(Also, our commentary together ended up being too goofy and personal than anything educational or broadly insightful. LMAO)
Origins
I read Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run when it first came out and fell in love with it immediately. It was so different for superhero books - as far as I had read at the time - grounded, cinematic, and almost... mundane. The art style was minimal but gorgeous. It felt like reading an indie title, and I think it demonstrated to me the potential of superhero stories to be about more than just action-driven plots and climactic events (There's a lot more of this stuff than I thought then!) I loved how Hawkeye was a character study of a flawed and also relatively unpopular character. It took the lame factor and perceived uselessness of Hawkeye and turned it into complex vulnerability, addressing it as a point of character without rebooting or nullifying his history. I would never stop thinking about a possible adaptation of it and all its fun idiosyncrasies.
Come 2019, I felt the MCU had really dropped the ball with Hawkeye and I couldn't see them making a faithful adaptation even in the future. I don't think they ever knew what to do with the character, or ever levelled with the comic version for inspiration. First Whedon gives him a family in AoU, then he's void of depth up to the point they decide to turn him into a serial killer vigilante in Endgame. His one trait was "family" and Renner was all too dry in the role. This stoic and conservative nuclear family-oriented government agent was a far cry from the messy hotheaded rebel I knew from the comics. It's a little dumb, but I knew I wanted to introduce people to the Hawkeye I loved and that's where this started. 2019, I loaded up Photoshop and went to work dissecting the first issue for animate-able assets.
Casting Clint
A huge part of this was finding a perfect lead. Enter ProjectAlpha22, who while sounding too young naturally, was capable of doing some pretty damn good impressions of Steve Blum, and that's why I pitched it to him. He'd done TOM and Spike Spiegel in other fan projects, and while that wasn't exactly what I was looking for, I felt confident we could work together to find something adjacent as a baseline for Clint's voice from there. I never seriously considered anyone else, despite him not coming with a usable approach.
We landed on something akin to Matt Mercer's Jotaro Kujo from Jojo's, an impression he could do that wasn't half bad. And since we weren't even doing that specific character, it was perfect as a new voice for another. Something discussed here was how the material in isolation doesn't actually demonstrate that Cool Guy™ quality. Fraction's Clint is dominantly on the "depressed, exhausted" side throughout the run, so direction ended up being important for Alpha to learn the character overall. The base voice needed to imply a snarky, roguish element to communicate even for new audiences, that this was Hawkeye in fresh-for-the-character circumstances.
It ended up being a lot of fun to work with each other. Alpha's comedic background allowed him to really pitch in to the humor inherent in Clint's vulnerability, and the youthfulness peeking through the performed maturity added to the Man Child elements of the character. But most of all, I ended up making another Hawkeye fan and friend!
Casting the Russians and Other Extras (+Production Hiatus During 2020)
Burn The Night as Ivan and the goons was probably the first person cast on the project, and I was very lucky for that. Not only was he a really dedicated performer, he was also a genuine Russian! He would improvise and ad lib a lot of cool/funny stuff, and sneak in plenty of real slavic phrases. Additionally, he took on a role as producer (rejecting to be credited as such sadly), taking it upon himself to involve other Russian voice actors he knew to lend their voices to the project. This is how we got Vladibear as the elder Tracksuit Boss, and SirSunMan as additional bros. It was very cool to have that authenticity on this dumb project, especially when I was expecting to get, at best, maybe cartoon-y caricature voices.
I was so grateful for that help, but he also probably singlehandedly saved the project by checking in throughout all of 2020. I actually almost ended the entire project then (only had a fourth of the first issue by my winter 2019 graduation), especially after the lockdowns had me dealing with other things in my life. I would have forgotten about this, but Burns always messaged me and kept the group chat active through all that time. I eventually came back to finish the first episode and when we saw that we had something, we decided we could do more. I wasn't about to throw away the production pipeline I figured out for the first issue, of course I wanted to utilize it some more. Burn the Night consistently pushed us to finish what we started. (Or at least find the endpoint)
Casting Kate
Arguably, Kate would make or break this, even if Clint was great. The Hawkeyes' relationship is the heart of this run and I had to get this as right as I did Clint. I approached ShadowGamingVA, an incredibly talented voice actor in the MCRP community, and she was a perfect fit. She naturally sounded youthful enough to play as younger than Alpha's Clint, but had a lot of charming energy that was very Kate Bishop.
She too knew very little about her character but the confidence and sass was an easy entry point for her. My direction was mostly just getting ahead of her possibly reading Kate as too cocky and flippant, something I felt would be the obvious place to go with the material. And it has been easy for some Hawkeye fanbases to interpret Kate and Clint's relationship as a caricature of itself - (Kate as the smart straight man to Clint as a doofus). So I wanted the different nuances to come through in their performed chemistry where it might not in the words alone. Shadow very smartly keyed into some vulnerability and a sense of genuine care for Clint where she could. By the end, I felt she understood Kate better than I did, turning in some reads I never could have directed or expected.
I couldn't have asked for a better Kate, and such a good supportive friend to have around. We ended up doing those extra Kate centric videos because she loved playing her so much.
Technicals, I Guess
Animating really was just a matter of dissecting each panel into layers on Photoshop, and using a combination of Content Aware Fill and my own drawing "abilities" to fill in whatever was left over. Then keyframes on Vegas would take each shot to its endpoint. I didn't get too ambitious with it, especially at first - out of lack of patience but also wanting to preserve what made Aja's storyboarding special. At the end of the day, I just had to find a pipeline that was reasonable enough that I could put more than half an episode out a year.
That first issue is particularly more restrained than the rest though, and you might notice there that I actually approached each overviewing "shot" as its own background to move the assets across. Speech bubbles, the different types of debris, and various limbs could stick out from and escape panels; every asset was on the timeline at once per grouping. This is different from later episodes, where each panel had its own sequence. I played around with that approach a bit in episode 2, and by 3 I was working entirely that way. The timelines became easier to handle, which afforded for more complexity and dynamic "camera" movement. I mention this to note how much of a learning process this was. It's very duh-doy, but I was basically just winging it at first.
The font parroting the style of the comic was created from screenshotting the book's credits as much as I could and using font-creation software to make a custom font. Which is why it might look a little janky, with each letter not uniformly aligned. It was close enough for me and it's not like I'm getting paid for these details so
Stylistic Influences and Inspirations, Score
I always knew what kind of "cinematic style" I wanted for this. David Aja's art and Matt Hollingsworth's colors were very retro in design philosophy and I looked to the 70's for what it would sound like, how it would be paced, and what I needed to evoke. Lots of that era's soul, jazz, funk, Lalo Schifrin scores, etc. And that's without addressing how much Clint Barton is the archetypal "cowboy" in an ensemble. Spaghetti westerns would inform plenty of my sound design choices, and by that Italian tangent, the sounds and music of giallo cinema felt appropriate to utilize for moments of peril or intrigue.
I would also be lying if I didn't say Cowboy Bebop didn't influence me a bit, if only as a blueprint for how to borrow from inspirations and make the end product its own thing. I never used a CB track outright or anything like that, but I had locked into Yoko Kanno and Shinichiro Watanabe's scoring language and used that to guide me.
Antonio Sánchez's work on Birdman played an interesting and unexpected role here as the ideal aural aesthetic. I felt like there was a correlation between how its posters and promotional art looked relative to Aja's work, the shared more grounded NYC setting, as well as relevant thematic interplay with the superhero film genre. I found that it just fit with the 70s New York I was already trying to evoke here and ended up looking for more drum fills as a musical motif as we went along. Kind of monkey-brain association, but I liked it. I decided to just straight up borrow from it for the first episode.
Aja's personal soundtrack for the book at the back of the omnibus was also a helpful resource, and aligned pretty broadly with my ideas for the soundtrack. I wish I had looked to it sooner in the process for more inspiration - but overall I'm glad he ended up approving as you'll see in the tweet I posted in this thread.
Interesting notes, I guess:
Episode 3 uses sound effects pulled straight out of Bullitt. A quintessential 70s car chase was the perfect reference here, and I do love the sound design of that sequence. Additionally, video game car engine sounds and even a recording of a real '70 Challenger made it into that episode. Probably the longest, most involved foley process of all the episodes. (And it got covered mostly by music haha)
Episode 4 as a Christmas episode was one where I used music as more diegetic to evoke that Holiday spirit. I also felt like referencing Vince Guaraldi trio of Charlie Brown fame was perfect for the art style and melancholic vibe of the whole thing. Mercy Mercy Me by Marvin Gaye as the closer might feel a bit random, and for the most part - yeah - but those little jingles in the wind up felt Christmas-y in this context, and the bittersweet nature of it all just played well with the note we wanted to end the series on. It's also a song that means a lot to Alpha.
Overall, the score did a lot for the tone, as eclectic as it could be - but I should note that I also wanted to leave lots of white noise and room tone with no music for most scenes. Something that stands out to me about a lot of modern filmmaking is that there is a lot of background music on top of even the most mundane of scenes. I felt like that would be a cheap way to inject this with an illusion of life; I wanted the performances and my editing to speak for itself. That mode of storytelling felt more "vintage" - not using the music as a crutch and letting scenes play out. Usually this would be a no brainer but I was making the soundscape and everything from scratch.
Adaptation and Creative License
With adapting from one medium to the next, you have to give and take a few things. These aren't 1:1 with the original issues, for a myriad of reasons. I took some creative liberties in presenting the plots and characters to maximize the audience's understanding of and connection to the characters, as well as try to keep their attention by keeping the typically drawn out exposition to a minimum. Here are some (not all) examples of things I changed from the source and reasons why...
Before and after frames to give the illusion of animation was pretty commonplace. The money bag and door in episode 1, pre and post punch Clint faces in episode 2, goons before and after being hit throughout, etc. As fluid as Aja's storyboards were, I felt some things could be added to give these motion comics more "motion." Drawing over the panels with new material was also something I didn't shy away from for directorial reasons. In episode 2, I added a radio for Clint to fiddle with to lead us into the scene transition music.
Episode 4, I made up the whole 'Avengers' sequence with Spider-Man and Wolverine, as there was only one real frame of that battle before the comic moves on. "Down Here On The Ground" by Lalo Schifrin was such a perfect track - heroic Avengers-esque triumph interplaying with the scrappier offbeat jazz fills - I pretty much knew I wanted that reflected in the sequence, panning back and forth between Spidey/Wolverine kicking ass and a tired Clint. I had to draw that tired Clint asset myself, as well as Spidey's flip.
I also took the titles for each issue and put them as the end-of-video title drops.
Which meant removing them from their neat integrations at the start of the issue, sadly.
And these are just a few examples. But I hope it shows the directorial and creative affordances to actually cutting out assets and animating to the edit, rather than just the glorified slideshow we could have done in less time. Figuring out when and where I could use the language of film to more effectively tell the story was the perfect marriage of my passion for production and comics. Rule of thirds, handheld camera effects, shrinks and zooms as pans, speech bubbles popping up with the pace of the conversations, expressions allowed to have their own beats, etc. Just being able to utilize these "cinematic techniques" - I had so much fun, even if it wasn't fully animated or super flashy or anything like that.
Things I Don't Like About The Project
Of course, there are also things I wish I had done better. You're always your own worst critic, but I actually decided not to criticize myself too much throughout this just to get through a day*. It would have driven me crazy if I had been as discerning as I could be. I had to let go of small things to keep the project moving, others were relying on me! I'm grateful we set up deadlines, but man do I wish I had done some things differently now.
For starters, every "main" episode in My Life As A Weapon was created from relatively low quality jpeg scans of the book. This is because I initially started this on a laptop that could barely do anything on, and having these images to work with played better with that equipment. The smaller screen also certainly made it easier to ignore. I didn't notice much quality difference until I got my new set up. Which, once I did, was crushed to find out the difference. But by that point I had already done a lot of work I didn't want to redo, and it's not like anyone seemed to notice in the first two episodes. And again, not getting paid so
The sound mixing is inconsistent and generally pretty bad across all the episodes. I'm not a sound mixer nor do I have the equipment to do that great of a job. The way everything was set up in the project also made it really hard to go back and adjust levels. And at a certain point, when no one notices or brings it up, it just doesn't seem worth it to try harder than I did. (That isn't to say I didn't at least try to do the bare minimum) I had to keep reminding myself that these are just random no-budget videos on YouTube. As long as the important creative elements come across, technical quality stopped mattering. I treated these like slightly more produced storyboards/animatics, essentially.
A lot of my fills and drawing in the first issue are pretty garbage, since I didn't have access to a tablet then.
If I could go back and take a little more time with these, I would.
The pixelated jpg "HAWKEYE" in the LA issue will haunt me forever though
Bonus Videos
The bonus videos were a fun extension of our time together, and we'll probably continue to do some more when we find the time. We could have done more My Life As A Weapon, but it's pretty linear from the point we stopped, and doing one would have driven me to commit to literally the rest of the run. No one has time for that. So these one-shots were a good compromise to keep working together just a little longer. Basically treating every video like it's the last one prevents burn out.
LA Woman or "How To Be A Private Detective in California" was a fun showcase for Shadow carrying a video by herself. She's really charismatic and I thought she deserved her own thing to showcase that as Kate. I actually tried to differentiate the score for this from the previous Clint-centric, Aja-drawn series. More contemporary jazz, as well as some music from film scores influenced by the 70s but not from it itself. Nice Guys, Ocean's, etc. Using ABBA as more emblematic of the next decade's pop music. I felt like that was appropriate for the "second generation" Hawkeye. I indulged a bit in some Sinatra at the end though, and even snuck in a musical reference to The Long Goodbye since I feel like Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlow was explicitly who Cat Food Man was a reference to. As part of a longer arc in the run, I also had to excise much of the Madame Masque plot that makes Cat Food Man make any sense. But I kinda liked him as a random, mysterious stranger for this one-shot.
The Spider-Man/Wolverine video is one of my favorite short stories in Marvel comics, so when I knew I had a Spidey and Wolverine that liked working with me, this was inevitable. We took it up in the gap between episodes 3 and 4 when Alpha was too busy with college to record as Clint. Perfectly small scale enough to fill in that production lull. I think it turned out quite well!
The prequel Young Avengers issue is not one I have a ton of love for, mostly because the Eli/Kate romance falls so incredibly flat for me, but I think as a meeting between Hawkeyes, this absolutely captures the ethos that makes them worth a look. It's defiance. Defiance to be a hero in the face of authority or even their own very human vulnerability. I love that Kate doesn't really idolize him or the other Avengers, she's striving to do better, to spite them as a complacent institution. I love that Clint supports and believes in her and her friends right off the bat, because he sees himself in their hope and rebellion. That he encourages that fire in her. If Spider-Man's thing is Responsibility, this was Hawkeye's.
This actually came about around halfway through the airing of the D+ show, when I realized that the MCU had no interest in any of this. They basically just used Clint and Kate to fill in the archetypal template of grumpy mentor/lively mentee; turning their anti-gentrification narrative into a messy Christmas murder mystery for some reason. This was our response "preserving" the Hawkeye ideology to the wider audience we've been able to tap into, in the face of an MCU that didn't care enough about the character(s) to do them justice.
Stylistically, the attitude of the video is all different. Alt pop/rock I felt fit the vibe of young, rebellious teenagers. A bit less Birdman and more the CW.
I also cut and changed a lot to make Eli and Kate's relationship work a bit more. There's an entire page of his Nice Guy ranting removed, and I purposely edited Tommy to be more of a bad date to make Eli look a little better. And then I added an extra line in the last scene to more closely tie Kate's kiss to Clint's lesson about "taking the shot" as opposed to anything Eli earned. Additionally, I took some creative liberties and gave Eli's last line to Kate, to tie our entire series together and ground it more in Hawkeye stuff than Young Avengers.
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Anyway, yeah. That's a long read. I don't expect anyone to get through it all, but it was nice to discuss this somewhere and leave it up for anyone interested in the creative process. I probably make it sound more involved and organized than it probably was, but these are genuine articulations of what I was thinking about when putting this together. Hope you find it mildly interesting.
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