Bedlam?
People who know me well (so hardly anyone) know that I've been toying with an idea for a story for some years now. I've written half of the story, scrapped it, rewritten the first chapter in a better style, abandoned it again, so that I might first hone my writing skills, and here we are.
Bedlam wasn't just an idea that I came up with off the top of my head, it was an idea that started small and evolved to what it is now. In a nushell it's a city secluded from the rest of the world. A town built in a wasteland around a humongous bomb. The inhabitants have no idea why they are there and have no contact with the outside world due to humongous walls surrounding the town on all sides. Make of it what you will, a study in seclusion, a pastiche of society, the fragility of peace and the first world or just the crazy imaginings of a twenty-something year old hermit (that's me, by the way).
One day I'll write that book, it's depressing, shocking and an unhappy tale of two young people trapped in a town that hates them (metaphorically speaking) but what may be more entertaining in the short term is just how this town came about so I decided to chronicle it here. It spans a few years, a mental breakdown or two and a few failed relationships. So let's get started;
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| Secret of The Ancients, my magnum opus, will be chronicled at a later date. |
When it all started
It all began when I was working in SPAR, the crappy convenience store. I had to smile and pretend like I gave a flying fuck about customer's needs and wait for ages whilst they fished around in their pockets for loose change to buy cigarettes or bottles of cheap brandy to fuel their addictions, and I found myself wishing that I could just tell them that I thought they were scum and that if they were hit by a bus on the way home it would be a net gain for the world.
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| Joel - he says what we're all thinking/ Faye - she's sweet, sensible and a bad influence. |
Okay, perhaps not so harsh as that, but I wanted to tell them to hurry the fuck up and that I couldn't care less about how the price of a tin of soup was different to the sticker price by two pence. I imagined a world in which people could act how they wanted, if you were having a bad day it would be okay not to smile and if you were pissed off you wouldn't have to smile because your contract says you have to. And thus the town was born.
It was a place with all pretence stripped away and people said it like it was. There was truth in advertising and people acted stupidly because of their own stupidity, like not being able to sue a company for not putting a warning label on their product. It's silica gel, used to keep packaged goods dry, you don't need a warning to know not to eat it but there is one because some dumb shit did.
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| "Help Wanted" episode one. It was ugly and wooden but introduced Joel and Faye. |
Help Wanted
The first iteration was to be made whilst I was dabbling in flash animation from 2008-200. I made a short animation (it took fucking ages and was tedious and arduous) called "Help Wanted". It was about two people, a man named Joel and a woman named Faye, who were to work in various roles and inevitably get fired over and over for speaking their minds and treating the annoying general public in the manner they deserve. I made the first episode, set in an unnamed department store and had the pair cause an old man to have a heart attack and a five-year old to be tackled by a security guard because they were interrupting their conversation. (Trust me, it was funny on paper but the execution was wooden and involved awkward pauses and only one camera angle)
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| He probably deserved it. |
The series was to evolve, I had drafted more episodes that were sleeker and harder-hitting, involving recurring characters, improved visuals and jokes but they never got past the design stage. (I learned that I am NOT an animator. I am a writer) so the series kinda died on its feet and the first episode was never published due to horrific errors in the programming stage that made the file far too big to be usable. After some time, I sketched a coffee shop, called "bucks coffee" that would feature in a later episode (and become Joel's coffee stand in the Bedlam novel) and made an animatic (a rough storyboard with sound) in the hopes of working with an animator in order to make the series go further.
Someone liked the idea and put me in contact with a man named Jordan Duchynz... something like that, under the screenname of Duchednier. He was an excellent artist and agreed to make something with me. We decided to make a shorter animation to test the water and it was here that Bedlam, the town, was born.
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| Warning labels was pithy, funny and had a message. |
Warning Labels
A short minute-or-so long piece about warning labels (entitled "warning labels") which was set in this as yet unnamed town was created and won an award for best daily submission on the website "newgrounds.com", pretty much the only place online that caters to amateur animators who use adobe flash (commonly called flash animations). The piece was written and visuals designed by myself, with Jordan putting in the "leg work" and animating it. I felt throughout that he was expecting to share the animating with me, but I simply didn't have the talent or knowhow to be of any use.
Sadly, shortly after I had designed an episode linking "warning labels" to the "help wanted" series, Jordan contacted me with a very odd link to a video. The video was about this meta-faith thing called "the secret" which in a nutshell is the belief that all successful people know something that makes them successful and other people don't know this "secret". It seeks to educate people and promises to make them successful too. I told him exactly what I thought of this (bullshit, incase you hadn't guessed) and shortly afterwards Jordan told me that we wouldn't be working together any further. The thing was, I thought that he was trying to make a joke or simply asking my opinion, I had no idea that a grown adult could believe in something so ridiculous and not be institutionalised. Turns out he thought it was true and the reason for his being a good animator and was upset that I didn't feel the same way. Sometimes I wish I had gone along with it as we made quite the team but then again, I don't like lying to people or to myself so maybe it was for the best.
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| Warning Labels was unwittingly set in Bedlam. It was here that the visual style of Bedlam was born, as well as the bleakness, cynicism and some of the town's main locations and characters. |
What happened next
Shortly after publication of "Warning Labels" I wrote this on my Newgrounds account. nothing came of it but it helps highlight what was going on at the time:
Info time!
The town warning labels is set in is "Bedlam", a city of restraint and freedom, a contradiction i know but read on:
Bedlam is a growing town being constructed around a gigantic bomb,
whether the bomb is active or not is unknown and the residents seem not
to care. the knowledge that death can come at any time gives people an
uncaring attitude and they act however they want all the time. people's
true feelings are released and whether they are crushed by depression or
elated with vindication is up to them.
The main corporation running the town is the Rappy corporation, an
uncaring faceless company determined to keep the townspeople blissfully
ignorant as it sucks their money and privileges out of them, forbidding
travel out of the town but keeping crime levels low through constant
surveillance.
I'm hoping to introduce the town and it's inhabitants in more depth
with future projects, and for people interested in seeing more - the
next project is titled "Bedlam: Help wanted" and is in production now,
watch this space!
Dil
I ditched the Rappy corporation idea once I realised how it wasn't corporations, but people and their own idiocy that made people miserable. It's not a corporation's fault that you're broke and feel insignificant and unattractive, it's your fault because you spent all of your money, aspire to something you can't be and think you need to look a certain way to feel good about yourself. Live the way you want to, not how the media says you should.
To be continued...
So that's what I have on the origin of Bedlam so far, there is more to come and I'll post the next part soon. Watch this space.
