3D art meets prose ... somehow, somewhere

Telling a story in pictures ... or pictures accompanied by as little text as possible ... is a very attractive challenge for an artist. Graphic novels and comics are the perfect expression of this -- you could also nominate movie storyboards as a perfect example. Somewhere out there, there's a sublime marriage between the written word and art. Not language and images per se, because that sublime marriage is called motion pictures. It's something else, and it transcends both comics and prose. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I think maybe Walt Disney had the same kind of vision and spent a lifetime trying to capture what he's glimpsed.

Way back when, in the days of yore when Disney was literally inventing cartoon animation on the one hand, and a guy called Willis O'Brien was inventing stop motion animation on the other (King Kong, 1933), the technology was so primitive, it took a regiment of artists years to produce a story that could be told in about 75 minutes.

And now? Wellll, unless you have four or five powerful computers, you still can't animate; but by golly, the visualization is doable right there on the desktop. So -- how long before the computer power becomes available to the ordinary artist, to be able to animate? I'm guessing about five years or so, when PCs have ten processors, never mind two or four, and they're cheap as chips. And ... am I looking forward to that!

But till then, I'm hunting for something that's a marriage between prose and art. Just can't ... quite ... find it yet. It's right there on the edge of my imagination, though. Shall keep looking.

Jade, 5 August