Story Start (nsfw!)
Flames | Chapter Start
Flames | Page 50
Flames | Page 52

This page's layout is a little unintuitive, but I've tried my best to give every indicator of the intended flow and make it as natural as possible. Originally, frame 1 was going to be on page 50. It was one of my key frames and I felt it absolutely had to be with the initial conversation that took place on the prior page. That determination, in fact, was one of the biggest reasons I've had to redo the layouts for page 50-53 multiple times now. Although, the final layout choice was driven by other improvements that I had nabbed along the way, it was somewhat funny to me that I ultimately solved the problem by breaking that key determination. I decided that it fit better with the rest of these shots and by making it a double wide, I could clarify the motions the characters undertook (just as page 49 had with the sneaking bit.)

However, it wasn't until yesterday that I realized I had mistaken this layout for the more intuitive mirror image layout. But, it's a trade off I guess. I get to keep this set of interactions in one place, instead of breaking it into two pages with the first being very sparse. I considered a double tall page, an innovation I had come up with in an earlier layout iteration. But, that doesn't look so good in thumbnails and mobile devices. I just didn't like that at all. The last alternative I considered was 4-evenly proportioned frames. That would be panels of 1280x960. But, it squished the existing squares too much and didn't look good at all. The half-height frames would have had too much empty space, not to mention requiring re-rendering.

Thankfully, the next two pages work so much better and naturally with their double wide layouts. They really take advantage of them in a way that you couldn't get with just two regular pages or something, too.