Exorcism: scripting sucks (Patreon)

Scripting is 100% my least favourite part of a project. There's nothing more tiresome than having to break down a page into its minutia, panel by panel. More often I script a page by doing thumbnails and working it out visually instead.But for a big, contained project like this, I needed to make sure I had all the details of the story laid out before starting on visuals. Because unfortunately, as tedious as I find scripting-- it's extremely helpful for fleshing the story out.

This is the first scene from the Exorcism outline. It's pretty loose, and it's not clear how many pages are involved here. But it tells me what I need to establish in this first scene.1) Our main character is Anna Kim, and she can see ghosts.2) It sucks3) She's a high school freshman, so it sucks A LOT4)By freezing up in front of the Very Cool Girls, we see Anna isn't good at talking with people.5) Anna then overhears two boys talking about ghost hunting.6) Thinking they can help solve HER ghost problem, she follows themFrom the outline, I broke down what I needed to happen scene by scene. And then I just slowly got more and more specific with each pass.

I eventually went from this

To this

That is the final script. So even now, I fought the panel by panel descriptions as much as I could. As the pages go on, I did eventually start going panel by panel. But for this establishing scene all I needed the essential actions and the undertone of what I was trying to tell with this scene.You can also see that once I started thinking properly of what was happening page to page, my original count was way off and I needed more space to work with! Which, again, is why this process is helpful. I guess!