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The Thrill Electric At MCM London Expo

Published Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:00:25 -0500

Last updated Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:35:13 -0500

The Thrill Electric panel at MCM London Expo showed off a new trailer that encompasses far more than what we've seen so far, emphasising themes and topics, such as Addiction and Revenge, that may befit its origins as a Channel 4 Education project.

On the panel were writers, Leah Moore and John Reppion, designer Emma Vieceli and Kit Buss from Windflower Studios. Bleeding Cool has been, okay, let's go with "obsessed" with this comic since it was announced and I was pleased that the book both lived up to and exceeded my expectations.

John Reppion talked about the different between their "enhanced" comic and a motion comic. He described their efforts as "trying to do everything a print comic can do and more. Imagine if you had a magic comic, a print comic that could do extra things, animate little bits, ambient sounds…. We're trying to add to print comics, rather than make it something else… It's a comic but with extra stuff."

Leah Moore sees the journey as to make something "as immersive as possible. It doesn't have to behave like a printed page, so why not use it, why not make it a bit different, try and harness it."

John confessed this was a lot easier as writers when you have so many other people on hand to help out the technicalities of it. And, as Leah pointed out, to draw lots of horses with different carriages.

The project started with Leah Moore reading a blog about the history of the telegraph and finding a culture with parallels to our own technology, intercontinental instant messaging, spam, sexting and more from the 1840s. And took the story of a young woman going into that industry, open to women as it was to men, as well as all classes, from the point of view of a technology nerd, an early adopter, keep to join the world she's a fan of. It all adds up to a rather modern experience, a hundred and forty years ago,

John compares the culture to his fifteen year old nephew, never knowing a world without the internet, to the point of view of the young in in the 1870s, never knowing a world without the telegraph. Leah pointed out that then, as now, the young embraced the new technology which older people were more likely to be distrustful of it.

She also pointed out a similar set of names involved with creating electric telegraph keys including Ericsson and Siemens, comparing the telegraph to a Carphone Warehouse (Americans, read Best Buy)

Emma Vieceli tales about character design, and how the original brief of six characters grew rapidly to twenty, and how she found the the Windflower Studio who would be able to replicate her style and look, as she found herself too committed to draw the comic on her own.

And a good thing too, the Windflower Studio are made up of four women, and on The Thrill Electric they needed the hands. Because of the three dimensional layering of the comic, they needed separate backgrounds, midgrounds and foregrounds, as Kit said, having to draw each page three times. The work was divided with Kit and Nina pencilling characters, and Fez and Alex pencilling backgrounds, and then swapping round to ink, creating a more cohesive style between them.

Littleloud took all these elements and used the computer game engine Unity, to create a three dimensional depth for every panel – and all the challenges John and Leah had left them. They've learnt a lot on this project, apparently.

I also asked about the surprising panning out/zoom panel to panel; storytelling on one page, as the action moved through a lobby. It turns out it is one of ten specific enhancements, one per episode, used to stretch and push the storytelling possibilities – the other being the moving three dimensional morse code from the first chapter. I wonder what the other eight will be?

And so there we have it. A digitally enhanced 150 page graphic novel told over ten weekly chapters. All for free, paid for by Channel 4. Aren't you lucky people? I can smell an Eisner nomination.

Oh, and my girls enjoyed the free badges…