This post also appears on the Brogan Blog: http://www.brogan.com/blog/pow-motion-comics-make-a-splash/
Take four scoops of a comic book, two teaspoons of a Hollywood film, a side of new media and you’ll have yourself one delicious helping of a motion comic.
In this new medium, companies like Gain Enterprises, scan pictures from an existing comic book, hire voice actors, add sound effects, and then include some of their own animation to make the motion comic.
“I like to think of it as cinematic comics — digital cinematic comics,” said David Gale, executive vice president of MTV New Media, in a interview with The New York Times.
One of the comic industry’s most loved franchises is flying fearlessly into the new medium. In preparation for the most anticipated movie of 2009, The Watchmen, a motion comic has been created containing all twelve issues of the original series.
Watchmen’s first chapter is available for free download on iTunes until August 2nd. After that, each chapter will cost $1.99.
According to Diamond Comics Distributors, DC comics (the publisher of Batman) sold an estimated 274,035 Batman comics last month. Compared to the 45,805,055 tickets sold so far of The Dark Knight, one can assume a lot more people are watching comic movies than they are actually buying comics. (Just to be fair, Iron Man’s publisher, Marvel, sold 156,239 Iron Man comics and the Iron Man movie has 44,487,003 sold tickets so far).
So, how do you market a comic book movie to people that aren’t reading your comic? Just scan the comic and make it look like a movie!
Another comic series, Invincible, who’s own movie is apparently (according to the rumor mill) about to start pre-production, is having the first motion comic television series starting on MTV2 this fall. A video preview is posted below:
Is it pure genius or just hard to watch?
“I don’t know…I have a hard time reading and watching the pictures at the same time,” said Brogan employee Jo Lynn Agee. She is a big fan of the CW’s Smallville (the young adventures of Superman) and several comic movies but actually got sensations of motion sickness watching Invincible. Although, she did say the images looked very good.
“I really liked it. It was a throwback to the comic cartoons I used to watch as a kid,” said another comic book movie fan, and Brogan employee, Ennis McGee. He added, “I could have watched a whole episode.”
It looks like time will have to tell if the motion comic is an effective marketing tool, new form of media, or an experiment gone wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment