Firstly, I tried a different approach with the webcomic, basing the drawing on an actual photograph rather than just two random portraits. I’m not sure what to think about it, and I have no definite words for it, though the following exchange is top of the charts:
Bruno: Everything seems to have gone white around us. And sort of sketchy. There’s no detail in the distance anymore.
Naomi: Don’t worry, Bruno, you’re just depressed.
Bruno: Do you think that is barking up the wrong tree? I’m increasingly suspicious, but it’s hard to let go of it.
Naomi: I like this one. Really. Bruno, I think this, too, can be a viable avenue to explore.
(just imagine the bubbles, willya)
Also, I’ve finally been commissioned to produce an advertising jingle for a laxative. Quite apart from fulfilling my life-long ambition of going to live in a Woody Allen movie, this is proving to be quite a engaging experience. My first attempt at a mock-up was rejected for several reasons: the advert was going to have a more feminine feel, so the metal intro was out, and anyway, apparently Hungarian medical advertisers want all ads to be kind of sedate, hush-hush, smily, possibly smily with slight melancholy for antidepressants, but with a soft light-source and several stereo hope-o-matics running full blast, preferably with only the slightest hint of the actual illness their product is intended to cure.
The lyrics, which I was given to put to music, go: “I take it in the evening – and in the morning it works (being a pun in Hungarian which also means “six in the morning” – hence the alarm-clock). And then, after the break, “Another great day is just beginning”.
Bear in mind that this is a mock-up, the barest indication of an actual recording I would have made had the customer liked it. So I got briefed some more: they wanted no indication of pressure, the fraction of a second of a bog with the lid down is all they want to put in to remind the viewer that constipation is not actually fun. They wanted something delicate, like Sting doing Not The Shape Of My Heart live , only not sad, but more sort of slightly happy. Benign. Leisurely. In fact the mood that most pharmaceutical companies exude these days in the medication ads that I get to see on the very rare occasions I get to see some telly is best described as ever-so-slightly stoned. Spaced out, or, probably better still, except I have no experience of the matter, some form of legal anti-depressant or similar.