📅 Monday, 26-01-26

In this email, I'm sharing with you the script I've written for the next video. Pay attention to its structure and how I've decided to sequence the information. I'll make my point at the end of the email :)

🎬 Action! 🎬

Setup

A few years ago I had what felt like the perfect idea for a manga.

Original characters.

A cool and strange world.

A story arc that surprises you when you least expect it.
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It felt like something I had to bring into the world.

I had to exist.

Desire

But I never learned to draw properly though...

I always wished I could, but I never got serious about it.

So this was the time to do it.

This was the time I finally learned to draw from imagination.

Conflict

But where to start?

There is a never ending list of dry exercises, expensive courses, and boring fundamentals that just thinking about it makes me doubt whether I should even try to learn to draw after all...

It is daunting to look at what art school students have to practice:

Perspective grids, ellipses and boxes.

Lots and lots of boxes.

I had fallen in the classic newbie trap.

I had made drawing glamorous in my head,

Without realising that the path to that skill was not glamorous at all.

But I pushed through my doubts, I made a serious plan, and told my girlfriend I would give her £50 if I failed to stick to it (that's like $70 or something)

Here's the plan:

• the 100 box challenge from drawabox every morning
• 2 and 3 point perspective practice in the lunch breaks of Monday, Wednesday and Fridays
• Thursday lunchtime a Master Study, copying some panels from another manga
• And on weekends I'd follow this expensive anatomy course I bought on Proko.com

And so my training arc started

💪

And in just 2 weeks... I gave £50 to my girlfriend.

I failed miserably.

Drawing boxes sucked the life out of me, perspective felt like homework. And the anatomy course... I barely started it.

Change

But then I had this thought.

I felt like I was preparing to become an art student.

But I am not going to art school.

I am not learning to draw so that I can apply for an entry level job in the animation industry or something.

I was overcomplicating it.

I just wanted to bring my project to life.

I just want to learn what I need for my project to exist.

So I tried it.

I went straight into trying to make my original characters.

I picked up books to help me draw the human figure as quickly and easily as possible and focussed only on that.

“How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way” is a book I feel like recommending because you can use it as you go, when you need it. And it breaks down the figure in really simple building blocks that help you create any pose you have in your mind.

Doing this made me realise that just by creating my own characters and trying to place in a scene I could actually practice all the fundamentals.

Boxes, ellipses, gesture, perspective.

All this stuff I was now learning it "in practice" - in a way that feels real - directly applied to a real outcome.

And I didn't give up after two weeks this time!

This approach made refilled my motivation instead of draining it.

I had stumbled on project based learning - which I am now convinced is the best way to learn anything.

Result + Reflection

To be honest with you though, I haven’t made that manga yet.

But I did learn to draw from imagination.

I have create my own characters.

And I have found my own art style.

That is the deeper lesson I’ve learned.

Your goals change as you chase them.

Your projects turn into something completely different as you work on them.

And that’s okay.

We come out of school expecting to have always a set path to follow towards a fixed goal.

But goals are not fixed.

And no course curriculum will ever teach you more than doing your own project.

So listen to what excites you and try.

It is always worth it to try.

The End

🎬 Cut! 🎬

Okay, I hope you enjoyed it, now onto why I shared this with you.

The more I study YouTube and Filmmaking, the more I am falling in love with the art of storytelling.

It is so much more than I thought it is, and I am a complete beginner at it.

Storytelling is all about understanding that

Information matters, but how it is sequenced matters even more.

Today i wanted to include you in a "practice round" of storytelling. To get some reps in, but most importantly to invite you to think about this in your own life.

Plus... surprisingly... I noticed that storytelling is making my actual art improve too!

But that's a story for another time.

Have a strong week
🫶

Massa

P.s.

If you missed this video, be warned that at minute 00:15 I got carrier away with too much realistic gore VFX... cover your eyes if you're sensitive to gore (sorry, won't happen again I promise!)

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Anyways, I'm sharing this video with you because it also used the same 5 act story structure. Can you spot each section?