Ok so at this point, this is just for me but if someone, sometime in the future finds this and wants to know where I began this will be it. So a little while ago this guy I konw at work came to me asking if I would like to work on something either artwise or writing wise. He recognised, as I have that we have a similar sense of humor and a similar perspective on a lot of stuff. Things like the awkwardness between strangers or the silence between friends is equally unbearable and either of us would rather not have to encounter it. I agreed that we should have a go at something and for me it would likely be for the purposes of putting some conecpt work together that I can either translate to a portfolio or be a solid basis for a real project and we went from there.
Now apart from an interesting perspective on life, Matt and I share one major experience and that is our particularly shitty workplace. We work at a big office supplies superstore that shan't be named (but is big, blue and square in appearance) and every day we are there kills us a little on the inside. From the customers to some of colleagues, to our managers there are just humans that are either completely insane or make you completely insane. So naturally the easiest thing for us to draw inspiration from is this workplace.
During our first talk we mostly focused on adapting a piece Matt had already written about a particularly awkward interaction between a customer and employee and how we could find character and humor in those kinds of interactions. For me character always comes first, I draw more interesting people when I know what they are about and I find that I can write more interesting people when I can imagine who they are. My goal from that talk was to find some broader archetypes that we can chisel some features in to so that they become interesting or unique and without too much effort we nutted out some main character that really represent the gamut of personalities that we want to deal with.
The first character I want to write about is Oscar. Oscar is essentially me and Matt in an amalgamated persona. He is our protagonist and our passenger. We see him as the normal person in this fictional world and that makes him weird. He is a cynical observer who tends to instigate interactions between character for what is essentially his own amusement whilst being mostly apathetic about the result. He works at our fictional store because he must, he is stuck there out or the necessity of money or the lack of career opportunities that facilitate his skill set. There is no win scenario for Oscar while he works here and so he might as well make the least of it.
more to come...
