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Tag Archives: Comics
World Building Voices…
Ayo Ehinmola watching the Ranbir's at the London Zoological Gardens
We hope all the characters sketched into The Arrival and Breakaway exercise their voices, develop personalities and adventure in the story universe they’re helping to create. Their contributions are the backbone of what is called a Shared Storyworld.
Our next blog post will explain how we intend co-creating Clockwork Watch’s backstory.
We would like You to tell a story… by Yomi Ayeni
Life is a story – one full of plots, sub-plots, twists and turns. It has many nuances, some lead the inquisitive minded on exciting adventures, others teach us not to be nosey, but you never know until you’ve taken that leap of faith whether you’re on course for a life changing experience.
Clockwork Watch is our most recent story – although it’s been in script form for the past 3 years, the support of our patrons has given us the confidence to say this could be one of the most engaging stories ever told. Want to know why? First it’s a ‘Love Story’ – set in a mad retro-futurist world where anyone can re-invent themselves in neo-Victorian chic. It’s a sandpit where you can experience a make believe universe, and interact with a story narrative.
Jay Bushman - Attendant at the London Zoological Gardens
This is why we have set Clockwork Watch at the very early stage of the ‘steampunk’ era, at a time when mechanical devices were the only source of power, and a ‘maker’ ethic led to some of the most amazing inventions of the industrial age. While we’re itching to see what contraptions and personas people conjure up for our live events, we’re also eager to ‘co-create’ what we’ll call ‘Clockwork World’.
Audiences involvement in Clockwork Watch was always destined to go beyond just receiving the perks listed on our IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign. People who’ve followed my work know participation is central to everything I create, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of our funders have been sketched into our first graphic novel: “The Arrival”, and we’ve started inviting them to help tell the story of their characters.
Hamish Jenkinson having afternoon tea in the Horniman Museum Conservatory
We are not restricting storytelling to words alone, contributions can be in the form of tweets, photographs, drawings or even video clips. So we’re throwing the door open for you to become a storyteller. Transmedia is all about participation, and we believe that through co-creation we can tell OUR story together.
Pre-Order The Arrival
We’re taking pre-orders for our graphic novel The Arrival – first instalment of Clockwork Watch!
It’s not too late to be part of something different…
Pre-order The Arrival
The Clock faces – part 3 by Corey Brotherson
And here we move on to the last of our main characters in The Arrival…
Chan Ranbir
Chan Ranbir
Chan is very much a driving force of The Arrival – for both the right and wrong reasons. A short-tempered genius, the father of the Ranbirs is stern, influential and a figure who looms over the family’s future.
Chan wants two things – for Clockwork to be a success, and to have his family part of that. In some respects he thinks that’s one and the same, and as such it creates one of the major problems for the family.
Reading Yomi’s original script made Chan into a very harsh figure. Which is perfectly natural. The Arrival is told through the eyes of his son, Janav, who only sees the move to England not in terms of building a future, but as a destruction of the young boy’s past. And as we take in the story through the perceptions of a slightly bitter eight-year-old, Chan comes across as a bit of an ogre. However, deconstructing that reveals a man driven by his passion to be a father to a better society, rather than merely being a simple obstacle for Janav to overcome.
Chan Ranbir, Master Kineticist
True, Chan can be seen as overbearing, but the intriguing thing that stood out when peeling back the layers of his character is that he is a man of the future. He is such an important part of the Clockwork Watch universe – a main cog, if you will – that he is one of the few characters in the story who has his eyes firmly set on what’s yet to come.
Which is the biggest problem for Chan. After all, the large irony of a man who has his sights on everything ahead of him, tends to be short-sighted to the things closest to him…
Cross Cultural Steampunk
The Arrival Frame
Here’s what happens when culture collides with history in a make believe universe.
Sikhism meets Steampunk.
A snippet from the front cover of The Arrival.
The Clock faces – part 2 by Corey Brotherson
Tinku Ranbir - Janav's Mother
And so on to our next main character in The Arrival– the dutiful mother, Tinku.
Tinku Ranbir
Mother to the ever-questioning Janav and wife to the stoic Chan, Tinku is a character who has great significance to the story. Her presence is felt throughout both The Arrival and Breakaway, and provides a sense of balance to the two male figures.
Tinku and Janav
It’s somewhat ironic that I initially found Tinku the hardest character to get a bead on in The Arrival.
Many of the stories I’ve written have been said to be “very female” – not just because they feature female lead characters, but also because of the themes and subject matter they contain. However, when it came to taking a look into what made Tinku work as a character and what made her more distinctive from the rest of the cast, it took me a bit longer to figure out.
It’s too easy to merely say that Tinku is the ‘heart’ of the family – while this is true (in more ways that one), Tinku represents more than the glue of conscience that keeps the Ranbirs together. She’s strong, thoughtful and probably the most socially aware of the family, which are important traits for anyone relocating to a different country, culture and society. As expected, Jen’s artwork conveys all those elements of her character with subtlety, beauty and grace.
Tinku possesses relatively minimal dialogue in The Arrival, but arguably some of the most important lines in the whole story. In some respects, this is as much her tale as it Janav’s…
The Clock faces by Corey Brotherson
So, you’ve seen some of the artwork showing a few of the characters you’ll be joining on the journey that is Clockwork Watch – but who are they? Well, you’ll be finding out soon enough in The Arrival, however there’s no harm in introducing some of the people whose lives will dramatically change before you over the next 12 months…
Janav Ranbir
Janav and his mother
At eight years old, Janav is our doe-eyed gateway into the world of Clockwork Watch, and our touchstone to this strange new and rapidly changing society. He’s headstrong, inquisitive and has a streak of rebelliousness about him, all traits that prove to be hugely important in the events that follow his arrival into England.
Yomi’s original script showed Janav to have a curiosity about many aspects of his new life, which is something Jen captures perfectly in her artwork. Janav’s wide-eyed expressions manage a wonderful sense of naivety and innocence which is something I wanted to explore visually early on in the story. Some sequences I adapted play up this element of childishness to create a sense of comedy, others work to present just how big, strange and scary it is to be taken from your home into a new country, especially one going through a Steampunk revolution.
Early Janav Sketch
Janav is a far more complex character than initially appears, and there are a lot of elements in Yomi’s original script that all push towards showing fringes of darkness that rests within this little boy. It’s something I was keen on exploring and emphasising from a dramatic point of view, which leads to some important shifts in narrative the closer we get to Janav. When you read The Arrival, see if you can spot the significant changes that mark Janav’s growth – which have huge consequences on the Ranbir family…
The Arrival – First Colour Sneak…
We’re on to a new phase in the production of Clockwork Watch. While you must be aware the entire graphic novel is being hand-drawn, it is also being coloured by hand. Our illustrator Jennie Gyllblad has been busy over the Xmas / New Year break, and here’s what she’s been doing.
The Arrival - First Colour Sneak
The Arrival - First Colour Sneak
Another teaser from The Arrival~
Putting on the Patka!