How true can I be?

Recently, there have been some questions about how closely I followed Terry's book in terms of making this movie. When I first thought about doing SIP as a film, I really wanted to do the scene where Katchoo stays with Emma in the hospital. In the book, they are very powerful, almost overwhelming images. Images that I thought would translate very well to film.

However, because of my nonexistent budget, I quickly realized that to do that story any sort of justice on film, I would need money that I didn't have. When I decided that the very first story arc would be the one to do, I kept in mind that idea of translating the images that struck me from the comic into the film. So, the short answer is that I followed Terry's book very closely, and in some instances, almost exactly. I think I read that Terry originally started writing Strangers in Paradise as a screenplay. When you read that first story arc, you can really kind of feel that in the story. I don't think that there are any thought balloons at all in the first story, and devices that Terry uses now (i.e. writing pages of prose into the comic) were also not done. This makes translating the first story into film a relatively simple matter.

I found that the idea I had to keep in my head during the planning process was, "What happens in between the panels?" A lot of the time, it was pretty easy to see what was going on there. Borders turned into movement, images ran together like a flip motion book. Whenever I got stuck, and couldn't think of how a scene would move, Dave would be there to bail me out. With his previous knowledge of camera work and photography, he could usually figure out the problems that I couldn't; or, in a number of cases, offer different, interesting ways to shoot the scenes.

While doing this though, I tried two separate ways of planning the shots. One was actually storyboarding scenes based off of the drawings in Terry's book, the other was strictly using Terry's panels for the storyboards. I ended using both ways during the film, as both were effective in different circumstances. This led to many of the shots from the film (and in turn, the screenshots that you see) looking very similar to some of the panels from Terry's books. Which I have no problems with. Like I said, there were some of the images that I really wanted to capture on the film. Katchoo and Francine in the kitchen, David reading poetry, Katchoo and Francine standing side by side in front of the window, Francine and Margie in Freddie's office. Lot's of good stuff, and lots of stuff that I wanted to use.

So, all in all, some of the shots might look similar to the book because they are. I've found that Terry's work translates well into film, and it would be silly not to try and capture some of the fantastic images that appear in his work. The film is it's own entity, but it does pay homage to Terry's work in a lot of different aspects, which is what I intended it to do in the first place.

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