A "Clowning Around" Family

Preparing some of the perks for backers I'm reminded of how many people worked for so long to bring this film to fruition. It's been a truly collaborative effort over a long period of time to get this far and so many people have helped along the way, excited to be part of the ongoing team we've accrued around "Clowning Around."

One of the themes of the film is that it's easy to do something for a day, but it's much harder to keep up good work when you're alone. Having our backers, supporters, and all the people who have worked on the project, given up their time and talent to it and just been there throughout has made the process to date a very warm experience. People have put huge pieces of their own hearts into the work we all wanted to do and we all adopted Damien's initial project as our own and joined his vision for what the film could be. I couldn't be more proud of our "Clowning Around" family or more grateful to be part of it. Looking at a rough cut of the first few minutes of film I'm acutely aware of how effortless it seems despite the effort that went into bringing it all about. Happy days and busy days with wonderful people.

Post production always seems like a quiet time where there's much less to speak about on a project and a lot of the team have moved on to do other work and aren't so much around, especially for me without the production team meeting every week I have missed the bustle of regular face to face meetings, but the wheels have kept turning and so much is ticking along that it's exciting to think of the things we still have planned. Right now it's about looking after our family of supporters and sending some of the digital goodies like the online comic book out! That has been a real labour of love by Damien and Phoenix Ryte and I truly hope everyone will love them as much as the guys have enjoyed creating them. There are two comic books in one double edition, sharing extra stories about our clowns for our backers to enjoy!

More funs soon!

Comic Books!

After our first production meeting with the crew, DOP Azul Serra brought up the idea of perhaps showing the characters previous history through comic books that we could show as part of our campaign. This was as the film has a certain comic book elements, both in the narrative and how these surreal characters exist in a very real world.

So after that meeting, I started touting around for an illustrator who would be willing to collaborate with us. After posting on a few forums and sending to a few colleges and universities, I got a very positive response from a comic book artist from Cleveland College of Art and Design (http://www.ccad.ac.uk/) who is known online as Phoenix Ryte. He sent me a link to some of his material (http://phenixryte23.deviantart.com/) and from there we started thinking of ideas and styles that would fit the film and comic book.

The back story idea we came up with was that Bonzo appeared at Mr. Fernelli's school, and the young magician was not too taken with the obvious and as he saw, dated humour of the clown and attempts to embarrass him. The after leaving school and setting on his own path as a magician, can't find any work so if forced to form a duo with Bonzo, the straight man to the clown. We then see a third scenario in which the ambitious Fernelli starts to plot Bonzos downfall.

It was interesting putting this together, as I hadn't given much thought to their back stories as I liked the ambiguity of it, but what doing this has done has given us a firm rooting of the characters, knowing a bit more about their motivations and where they have come from and to, and will be interesting to flesh this out not only with the unique comic books we are creating for our IndieGoGo backers but also in the audition process with the actors.

As you can see from the designs, we have used the colour pallette and designs based on our stills shoot, but the characters are not exactly the same. Bonzo's hair is more red than orange (to show thats where Fernelli gets his idea from) and Fernelli is also more the traditional magician, before he takes on the aspect of clownishness into his act and starts to take Bonzo's audience.

Having finalised the character designs we are now working on having the comics finished in the next few weeks.