Process: Optional Exercise #1 (Casablanca Comic)

I started going along to Process, a monthly comics workshop/discussion group set up by Steven Walsh and based at Gosh! Comics. It takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and prior to this month's meeting Steve posted an Optional Exercise online for people to have a go at: to adapt the following scene from Casablanca into a comic.



I wanted to give this a go, although because I didn't have much time to work on this before this month's meeting, I decided to focus on part of the scene (from 1.44 in the video). Because Process is partly about "How" people make comics, I thought that I would also include my step-by-step process here.

So after watching the scene and deciding that I wanted to do it as a one page comic, I found the script online and drew a rough thumbnail sketch...



Because that part is filmed from a fixed camera angle, I wanted to replicate this, with only changes in facial expression and some minor changes in the characters movement. So I drew a sketch of the panel and then copy and pasted it on the computer to set up the page before printing it out and drawing in the additional panels and writing in the dialogue...



I then drew over this on a lightbox and then scanned and coloured the final page in Photoshop, colouring in full colour and then converting the file to greyscale. And this is the final page: