Visual Scripting is a method for natively writing comics and other visual narrative media in physical space, envisioning layout, and better utilizing physical elements of books (such as page turns)…without drawing. I put together a tutorial about Visual Scripting a few years ago. It’s a pretty complete post, recently tweaked to more accurately reflect how I’m working, now that I’ve had this system up and running for years. But it’s a complicated, so I made a visual scripting video tutorial to walk you through building a template!
It can be done by hand, but the most useful version of it uses page layout software like Adobe InDesign, because you can easily move, insert, delete, resize all elements in a way that’s really not possible on paper. (The analog version of this is pretty close to the Comics Window.)
I wrote all of Out on the Wire as a Visual Script (based on an outline and prep work I did in Scrivener), and I’m currently working on the last chapter of Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars that way. It’s a really effective approach. Integrating the visual into the script along with the flexiblilty of rewriting has revolutionized how I write comics, and the method would be adaptable to many other kinds of visual narrative as well (picture books, video…)
Check out the Visual Scripting video tutorial here:
I’ve also made template I built in the video available for download. Grab it here.
Visual Scripting is a method for natively writing comics and other visual narrative media in physical space, envisioning layout, and better utilizing physical elements of books (such as page turns)…without drawing.
Find a full (written) tutorial on using Visual Scripting here.
Grab a pre-made Visual Scripting template here. Also included, in case you’re using an old version of InDesign: an .IDML version for CS4 and up.
