Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Inside the Laboratory: Behind the Scenes at Imaginos Workshop

Part I - The Idea

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that anything worth a damn begins with an idea.  Now that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing because the idea could be a terrible piece of shit…but we try to avoid that here at Imaginos Workshop.  Let us begin…

September 21st 2011

                Mark met me at the Bloomfield Township Public Library and we were going over updates for our presentation at Detroit FanFare later that weekend.  During that meeting he mentioned the possible stories for our second sampler which was to be released during summer 2012.  There were a couple of stories that were already slotted for the sampler but then he turned to me and said “I want you, Joe and Jon to come up with an entirely new comic idea.” 

                When he said that I stared at him for a couple of seconds and then realized he was dead serious.  I wasn’t scared just pleasantly surprised that he wanted something new.  Mark was asking Jon, Joe and I to act upon the basic principle of Imaginos Workshop which is to create and develop a new idea.  When I told the news to Joe and Jon their reactions were in step with their personas – Joe had a mildly surprised look and Jon had the same neutral mask on. 

                We immediately started brainstorming ideas – Joe and I talked about one idea that would encapsulate the action/fantasy/horror genres during a car ride from Ann Arbor.  Mark placed no restrictions on us – basically telling us everything was on the table as far as genres.  At the time of this blog entry all three of us are currently brainstorming.  Since we know that the other two stories in the second sampler are of the religious and sci-fi futuristic types we wanted to offer something different – this would give the sampler a nice balance.

                There are times when Joe, Jon and I will each come up with a different take on a specific genre in which case we sometimes mix & match certain details that work while editing out the ones that do not necessarily fit – we never completely discard any details because you just never know when they’ll come in handy.  We all have different processes as well – I usually enjoy opening up a Word Document and just typing while listening to my Pandora music. 

I’d like to say I know how Joe and Jon go about their madness but I prefer the mystery.  Sometimes I resort to the ‘Brick Method’ which is named after the delightfully moronic character Brick from the movie ‘Anchor Man’.  This involves me looking around my surroundings and cobbling together words – I kid…sometimes.  In the end though we’re usually able to construct a premise for the story from our ideas and then we move on to fleshing out the characters which consequently helps fill out further details to the overall story.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment where we’ll go into details of fleshing out the ideas going from character development to plot points.  Thanks everyone, I’m out.
Nik

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