Sam and Fuzzy Q & A: Photo Edition
Got a question you want answered? Just drop me an email with "Q & A" in the subject line!
"Can you talk a little more about how you made your recent photo comics? Are all the photos yours? If so, did you take them with the specific panels in mind? Was it hard to blend the cartoon art into the photos?" -Max
The whole process was very experimental! I've never really done anything like it, and it was a real impulse decision to try it in the first place!
But yes, all the photos are mine. For the first comic, I worked entirely with photos I had already taken -- they're all shots of various places I take my real-life dogs for walks. But when I decided I wanted to try doing more, I went for another big walk and took a ton of shots. I basically brainstormed the story as I was taking the photos, thinking about what I could do with the shots I could get and the locations I had access to. Then when it came to mixing the art into the photos, I tried to keep it simple, taking some inspiration from the way the Gorillaz video "Humility" used broad lighting and shadow effects to blend otherwise flat-coloured charaters into live action footage.
(I dug a little more into this process for my S&F Extra-tier Patreon backers this month, including some images of the different stages of the process!)
"In comic 1141 you mentioned looking into "Oh No Robot". Did anything ever come of that?" - Danish
No! To be honest, I completely forgot about it for... well, I guess it has been years at this point.
Oh No Robot is a really cool site that let you search through a bunch of comics for particular words or dialogue. However, it requires someone with the dedication to transcribe all those words into the database. Also, I'm not actually sure if it still works! Are there still comics being added to those databases? I guess I could just ask Ryan this question and find out, but I didn't think to do it before writing this post!
"So, based on the artist robot's comments in this comic, do robots have their own internet? Is the surface internet somehow restricted to humans only?" -M
Oh, anyone can use the "human" internet! That artist robot -- let's call him Artie -- is just a very recent arrival on the surface. Prior to this, he has probably only lived in the robot homeworld of Megalopolis 01, which was completely isolated from the surface world (and surface networks) to keep it hidden.
The robots of Megalopolis almost certainly have (or had) their own internet. It was probably a lot less creepy and a lot more dry than the human version, since the robots of Megalopolis rather famously lack imagination.
That's all for this week, team! But come back on Monday for our next comic.
-Sam Logan
