Right now it's about 1:30 a.m. The entire weekend flew by and I spent most of it at the computer, yet somehow I didn't manage to write a single word of the screenplay. So much for the two page a day screenwriting habit I was trying to develop. I do have a good excuse though, I spent most of the week getting the movie's website up and running. I had wanted the www.beartown.com URL for the site, but that was snapped up (literally) days before I first looked in to buying a domain for the film a few years ago. I put off the domain purchase forever hoping my first choice would become available, but when the Wagner Group (owners of beartown.com) renewed the URL for five more years I settled for the hyphenated www.bear-town.com.

I had always intended this site to be used to document and promote the production of Bear Town, but I briefly experimented with the idea of creating a "web comic" based on Bear Town using a blend of computer graphics and photography here instead. I'm not sure now how serious I really was at the time, but I felt inspired to try after reading Scott McCloud's excellent book on the future of comic books, er "sequential art", Reinventing Comics (I also highly recommend Scott's first book Understanding Comics - even if you don't give a hoot about comics it is a fascinating read). I eventually abandoned the idea once I realized the amount of work required to create the web comic would be almost as much as producing a feature film. Almost.

My creative experiment wasn't a waste of time though - much of the art I generated has been recycled for Bear Town's storyboards or conceptual art. I've archived some of the finished portion of the web comic here for posterity. If you try to download it through a dial-up connection please be patient while it loads, as it's pretty graphics-intensive webcomic.

Posted by Andrew at 3:30 AM | Permalink

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