People usually have a lot of ideas buzzing around their head, but if they don’t put it on the paper, they just fade away.
Poultry United is one of the ideas I have had for some time now, and for the purpose of NOT abandoning it, I have started this blog, which became a workshop and the playground where I try to work on various things related to Poultry, such as:
Overall concept. What is this whole thing about, who are these birds, where do they come from, what is their relationship and how they, as a metaphor for the real life subjects, behave – related to the worlds current affairs. Observing this world that we live in gives so much inspiration for Poultry! The question is if I wanted to treat Poultry as a simple editorial cartoon or take it further to standalone world that is a reflection of our world? Not sure yet…
Media and format. Since I have decided to work on Poultry for only one evening a week, 3 frames comic strip seemed to be a nice and efficient format to work with. To speed up the things even more, I developed a library of Flash symbols that I use in the production of the comics. I have tried 1 frame comic format as well as “loose” formats, a bit of text, a bit of images. At this point, for a various (brainstorming) reasons, using all this formats seems like a good solution.
Writing. I am not a writer, by vocation or education, and English is my second language 🙁 But, since I am into this, I am trying to learn about screenplay, comedy, character development and eventually trying to apply that knowledge here.
Visuals. I guess, one of the biggest joys of this project. Visually, creating characters, environments (still short of those), props and other elements and putting together these little miniatures in form of comic strip is a pure joy. Often, I come back to a previous strip, change the composition, layout, expressions, touch up the colours or contrast. So, even the strip is already published, it is still work in progress!
Character development. Aside from visuals, developing the characters inside to the point where I know how exactly would they behave in any given situation is the ultimate goal! With all the characters that I have introduced so far, I feel I am on the right track… The short format itself doesn’t allow too much complexity in the character development, so there is a bit of limitations there. Another thing, since these birds are personifications of SOME national stereotypes, there is an ever present danger of falling into real stereotypes, which would be yaiiks… so I have to pay attention!
Derived products. Once I have defined characters and situations, and much more time dedicated to Poultry, I would definitely like to transfer them into animation shorts, interactive computer and board games and some other formats.
Interface Design. Blog is a great, simple and free tool for this purpose. Having a database and a front end interface that is so easy to modify is perfect to constant improvements.
Persistence. It is so easy to give up. But, with every new week and every new post, with or without feedback from readers, the Poultry is reinforced and looking and feeling better and better! I still can’t say if Poultry United is great for it’s jokes, characters or design, but I can say for sure that it is great as a hobby :)))
And of course, keeping it simple really helps!