We the Write stuff.

Ello all

Sorry for the slight hiatus (sliatus?) but we the writers have just come to Jaipur for a bit of a holiday and the recording of the new Civil Cats album. Incidentally, I must mention the super comfortable journey we had travelling by Indian Railways. I’m sure normal sleeper class would’ve been 18 hours of hell, but in air conditioning, it was quite the opposite. Props where they’re due.
Onto the post then, and today’s post is about an idea which has shattered my foundations of vision, reading and general decoding.
A few weeks ago a designer buddy of ours guided us to the absolutely superb TED.com. TED stands for Tech, entertainment, design and was originally a conference which decided to upload it’s talks. They get the most incredible thinkers in just about every single analytical or creative profession there is to discuss cutting edge ideas and concepts, and the best part is, all of them are really funny.
Anyway, while scanning through the video archive, I found a talk by a comic artist and writer named Scott Mccloud (who seems to be thick pals with Neil Gaiman- the Chuck Norris of comic writers).
Anyway, in ’93 Mccloud buys himself a shiny new piece of technology called the computer. On it he discovers a bunch of stories called web comics and it strikes him, that web comics are really just normal comics in a computer screen. So he starts to wonder, and bear in mind this is 1993 we’re talking about, and he comes up with the idea of the Infinite Canvas.
See, a screen, unlike a piece of paper has no physical constraints. It has unlimited depth, width and height. You just have to move the vision. So Mccloud realizes, you can have a comic strip that isn’t left to right linear and you can have Manga that isn’t right to left linear. You can have anything. You can have parallel storylines which physically run parallel to each other. You can have characters going off in a tangent which actually stretches out of the actual strip’s flow.
The possibilities are endless and as one can see on the various sites, some of the work is just awesome. My personal favorite is this one, in particular, Mccloud’s own ‘Brad’s somber mood’ which is kick ass, it was started as a side project of Microsoft’s live labs project.
The amazing part is, anyone can do it, so if you’re proper inspired by the end of his video click on the create button and to quote our old friend from ‘ART ATTACK’ “Go on, try it y’self! We’ll be here again next week. Bye Bye”

OH! And before I leave, Tejas and Kyra finally watched Watchmen. Tejas was a heap of melted 'WOWZAH!' by the end and Kyra wished the second half had been halved.

So there you go.