ADAPT™ = Allied Digital Artists Partnership Teams™
How often have you uttered that you could do comic books better than what's being produced today? How many of you ever had the chance to prove that? Talk is cheap. Here's the project where you'll get to back that talk up. Simply put, this endeavor will be the jump off point where you'll get to advance your creative vision in an all ages venue to make your point. For the past couple of years I've been trying to get a couple of print groups I belonged to embrace the digital age and be at the forefront of that revolution. Unfortunately they're too entrenched in the 'old' way of doing things and unwilling to, at the very least, try it out. I don't fault them though, quite the opposite. Their not picking up the mantle allows me to do it on with a team of like minded individuals and other creators who would be excited by being invited to 'do their own thing' and compete with others who will be raising the creative traditional and digital bar on a weekly basis utilizing the digital expanse as a method of delivery.
Prior to being part of that print group, I got a group of artists from a publishing company I art directed for to do weekly comics back in 2004. They started out well, but like most endeavors that require time but have no financial return at the outset, enthusiasm waned. To be fair, some of the stuff was pretty good but that has no value if it's not continued to develop a great storyline, generate an audience or be satisfactorily completed.
While exploring ways to get creators to create over the long haul, produce their best work, and do it with excitement throughout the run of the storyline, I was stymied. Then while taking a course on process re-design I saw the method that, not only could work, but would work. The original concept was flawed only in its needing something more to make it worthwhile to the creators involved.
This is the problem with most visual creators. We've been led down the primrose path of 'work for hire' in the professional arena where what ever we create is deemed not really ours because we were paid to create it. We don't get to share in the eventual bounty when whatever concept we've created hits it big. We're also at the mercy of small and independent publishers who would pay us last for what we create to make them worth being brought in the first place, all the while benefiting from the fruits of our labors. Shouldn't we be benefitting first?
That is what I believe.
That's what's being created in this bold online experiment. You will be required to create like you never have before. You will own all rights to what you create. Your will have to have a bring your 'A' game each and every time you produce work. You will be in competition with yourself to see if you can bring the heat and top yourself each succeeding week. You will be vested by the sheer will of what you produce, it's overall content and it's innovation. Your art, your story, your design. Will what you produce move people or will it just be pretty pictures wrapped around a self absorbed story?
This is where you get to commit to something that will benefit YOU first and everyone else second. You are the creator and no-one should gain more from your labors more than you. All that's needed is your commitment to produce 52 visual art strip segments in a specific format and you'll have to commit 15 of those up front. If you already have a story you're doing, that's fine. You may have to reformat it to fit the format we're aiming at for this but that's easy enough to do digitally.
Make no mistake, this isn't about your playing around with what you produce or goofing off with it. It's about a professional attitude with this as if it were a paying assignment. You'll be building an online repository of material for a specific reason which will be divulged sometime around month seven.
Remember what it was like when you first began to create? That's what we want from you. The joy you had when you did something that was good just because you CREATED it. We've made the framework as creator friendly as possible, asking for only a small amount of your time on a continual basis.
I believe that when a creator creates, good things happen. I also believe the digital platform is the wave of the future of the visual arts medium. Don't think comics or comic books. Think visual arts used in a comic book or comic strip format. [ Click the 'blue' ADAPT™ link below for more infomation ] ADAPT™ because the future is here, NOW!
