Why a Visual Novel? (or The Evolution of Pseudomé Studio)

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Our Journey through Visual Storytelling

Growing up as a kid who loved Saturday morning cartoons, I’ve always been interested in animation. As I got older, I ultimately found myself getting into Anime, since it didn’t have that “just for kids” stigma that cartoons in the U.S. are typically saddled with, and I was able to find characters and storylines that were targeted towards an older audience. There’s just something about the entire package of animation that drew me to it over other forms of media; the abstraction of drawings help us suspend disbelief with characters and situations that would seem ludicrous in live action, and the combination of art, color, motion and music that can make it all very compelling when it’s done right.

My creative side has always been fueled by a bit of a, “I want to do that, too!” kind of inspiration (regrettably leading me to create some work that’s more derivative than I’d care to admit), so, at some point in college, my associate and I founded Pseudomé Studio for an experiment in creating our very own pseudo-anime.

Animation

The three-year project that followed was a fantastic learning experience. It taught us both a lot about art, writing, direction, pacing, etc. Some of the best and worst aspects of working on it was the collaboration between us, the actors and composers; sometimes fueling our inspiration, and bringing the project to a level we couldn’t have attained on our own, while other times putting us into binds when our collaborators lost interest, dropped out, or didn’t work to their full potential.

While I could easily drone on forever about our experiences on this project, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to focus on one very important aspect that we learned: With only a couple of people involved, we discovered that animation is a very inefficient form of storytelling.

Indeed, after about three years of working in our spare time, we had only produced about eighteen minutes of animation, and barely scratched the surface of the story we wanted to tell. While we knew that, as an experiment in our free time at college, we likely wouldn’t be producing more than one film, we were both rather disappointed in just how little of the script we were able to get through.

Comics

Partially as a way of promoting our work in animation by providing regular updates to our website, we had been working on a webcomic on the side. I had first discovered manga by coming across Ghost in the Shell, and, intrigued by how much it felt like reading the storyboards for the film, thought it might be an interesting avenue for us to explore. At first, a bi-weekly comic seemed like an easy enough way to try it out.

While manga dropped much of what I liked about animation―color, motion, sound, music, acting―it still retained a lot of what was really important. Furthermore, it required a lot less in the way of resources in order to make, so, when provided with the opportunity to turn our webcomic into a graphic novel series, we jumped at the chance.

Three more years and another big learning experience followed. Sure enough, graphic novels proved to be a far more efficient form of visual storytelling than animation, allowing us get a lot more through to our audience with roughly the same amount of time and effort (though, given the comedic nature of the series, there was never really a lot of actual story there to tell). By the end, however, we realized that, over the course of three books, we’d only covered about ninety pages of script. As fans of epic stories with evolving characters (the kinds better suited to a TV series than a movie), we came to the realization that telling such a story in graphic novel form would require a significant portion of our lifetimes to accomplish.

And, Finally, Visual Novels

Since our interest in anime was one of the driving forces in our desire to create, I started looking into more of the source material anime was derived from. While a few were created as anime to begin with, many shows were originally based on manga series, very similar to the kind of graphic novels we were creating.

There were also a few that were adaptations of Japanese light novels. I wasn’t very familiar with these, but it seems that they were just series of short novels with a handful of manga-style illustrations inserted throughout. This was certainly something we’d be able to reproduce fairly easily, but, on one hand, most of our writing experience thus far was limited to character dialogue, and, on the other hand, light novels were so far removed from the kind of visual storytelling we were interested in that neither of us were terribly enthusiastic about the idea.

The other source material for anime that I’d seen mentioned occasionally were visual novels. While I didn’t find much that interested me in visual novels by way of content, the medium itself appeared to have quite a bit of potential.

Whereas comics focus on a lot of artwork and fairly minimal text, visual novels skew in the other direction; lots of text, with only some key pieces of art. Not limited to being something that the reader would look at for under five seconds before turning the page, most of the character and background art is reusable, with a stronger focus on quality over quantity. Furthermore, visual novels bring back some of the aspects I’d been missing from animation (such as music and, optionally, voice acting).

It has other interesting virtues as well. The audience can simply be shown something that might be difficult to describe with text, but by not showing everything, it could also tap into the ability of a novel to use the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

They’re also fairly unique in the way they can incorporate interactivity. Since visual novels can allow the story to branch―much like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of old―we can now explore a number of “what if” scenarios that would end up on the cutting room floor, otherwise. This presents one of the few instances where, as authors, we can delve into things like the real consequences should our heroes fail at whatever they’re trying to accomplish, without having to cheapen the story by having them awaken to discover that it was all a dream, or fly around the Earth so fast that time inexplicably reverses…somehow. While the current incarnation of Errant Heart may not use this aspect of visual novels much, it’s still something I’d really like to play around with more in a future project.

Conclusion

Like the projects before it, Errant Heart has been a big learning experience for us. With a word count upwards of 100,000, we’ve found that, yes, this format does allow us to tell a lot more story than anything we’ve tried previously. It’s also come with a number of its own challenges. One of the biggest, unfortunately, may be finding an audience.

Visual novels are still a small niche product, but with tablets on the rise as media consumption device, and independent games and projects rising in popularity of late, I’m hoping we might find a way to reach people with it…and hopefully have enough success with it to be able to further explore the medium.

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