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Galactic News
Thursday August
8,
2002
Homing Beacon
#66
The latest Homing Beacon has arrived, and today we get to talk about penciling Attack of the Clones! At last year's Comic-Con International, Jan Duursema couldn't say anything about her work penciling the Episode II adaptation for Dark Horse Comics. This past weekend, though, she was finally able to speak freely about the assignment in front of an audience of comics fans.
"I was little hesitant to take the part," she admitted. "I thought, ‘I'm going to know everything about the movie and I don't want to!'" Her hesitation subsided quickly ("in two seconds," she noted), and she eagerly entered the world of Attack of the Clones. "It's more difficult than working on a regular comic book, because that's in your head. In an adaptation, you're trying to see into what someone else is going to do with a movie, and trying to recognize how they're perceiving it."
Working off of reference photography and concept illustrations, Duursema had to reconstruct the movie panel by panel, transforming the moving widescreen image into compelling sequential art of varying proportions. "You're trying to figure out what's the most important thing on a page," she relates. "Which part of the conversation do you want to give the most weight to? I try to balance out the size of the shots and the intensity of the faces depending on what we needed for the story, or what I felt the emphasis needed to be."
While the reference imagery and constant contact with LucasBooks editor Chris Cerasi helped fill in a lot of gaps, many times Duursema was left to interpret or create imagery on her own. Much of the reference photography was against featureless bluescreen, and George Lucas and ILM were refining scenes such as the droid factory and the final Clone War sequence right down to the wire.
This left opportunities for Duursema to still be surprised by the finished film. "Even though I knew a lot about it, and seen a lot of images, when I saw the movie I was just so blown away," she says. "It was amazing."