Date: October 2, 2009
Title: Moon Town – Scifi in Webcomics
Podcaster: Steve Ogden and Paul Caggegi
Link: The Process Diary http://www.theprocessdiary.blogspot.com
Description: Paul Caggegi of The Process Diary talks to Steve Ogden about his free online web comic Moon Town: a fun and quirky sci-fi story set in the not-too-distant future. Steve explains when the laws of physics must yield to the laws of good story telling… and when they actually come in handy.
Bio: Paul Caggegi is a freelance video editor and 3D motion graphics artist working in Sydney Australia. He hosts The Process Diary, a podcast about showing you how it’s done by going out and doing it.
Steve Ogden has been a professional artist since 1980. Between 1998 and 2003, Steve worked for Cyan, Inc (makers of Myst and Riven.) He now works at Sid Meier’s Firaxis Games (Civilization, Pirates, Railroads.) When he’s not at work, he writes, draws, and works on projects such as Moon Town.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the world’s leader in variable star data and information, bringing professional and amateur astronomers together to observe and analyze variable stars, and promoting research and education using variable star data. Visit the AAVSO on the web at www.aavso.org.
Transcript:
Moontown – science fiction in webcomics (transcript)
Paul: G’day to astronomy fans everywhere, my name is Paul Caggegi – host of The Process Diary, a blog and podcast about showing you how it’s done by going out and doing it. Today I’ll be chatting with creator and mastermind behind the Moon-Town web comic, Mr. Steve Ogden.
Ah, so Steve, thanks for taking some time out to talk to me and stuff. Do you want to tell me a bit about the beginnings of Moon-Town, and a little bit about what it’s about just in case these listeners out there somewhere in the world don’t know about it yet.
Steve: Ha. I’m confident many, many people don’t know about Moon-Town. I really do appreciate this opportunity to tell people about Moon-Town. Before I get too much into it, I did want to say, you were one of the first people that said, “Ignore anybody that says you should be doing anything else. This is what you should be doing. This is great, I can’t believe we were ever gonna have Moon-Town as a 3D thing, you know, and ah, keep doing this as a comic,” is like, one of the most positive comments I ever got on Moon-Town, at least so far. And that was very, very encouraging. So I really appreciate that. That’s going back to the very beginning. Like, you saw the 3rd or 4th strip, and that was one of your comments.
Paul: What’s the synopsis, what’s the pitch of Moon-Town?
Steve: You know I wish I had some neat little button-hole synopsis I could give you, you know, a little elevator pitch. You know there’s no.. this isn’t like uh… what was it with Star Trek that was uh.. what’d they say it was, “Bonanza in space,” or something? Or “Wagon Train in space?” The synopsis I’ve been giving people is that this is not the Enterprise you know? It’s like you could define this in the negative and say that, you know, these are the guys at the bottom of the pile, these are the miners and the security cops and you know, the guys that are not the brightest and the best. These are not the best pilots in the world, these are people that are truly the reluctant hero. These are people that walk out of some Ridley Scott movie somewhere, and all of a sudden, they’re thrust into this hero position, which is a really interesting position for them to be in. So it’s like a comedy/drama/noir kind of a thing. Somebody described it the other day – I think very well – as um, kind of a “Firefly meets Douglas Adams,” and I thought that was a really – that’s a… that… it makes a great image in my mind. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but that’s about right.
Paul: Why did you set your story on the moon?
Steve: The original idea for Moon-Town came from a meeting I was in about 7 or 8 years ago, and I was just bored out of my skull, and I drew this little alien with three antennae, and he’s waving at the virtual camera, and he’s goin’ “I’m trapped in Og’s brain!” And I had this thing and someone sitting next to me starting laughing, and you know, you’re in a meeting and someone starts to laugh near you and you’re just like “shut up” you’re elbowing them and trying to make them cut it out, and at the same time you’re really hoping you can make them laugh even harder. So then I started drawing these little characters on the moon running around this little alien. And that’s kind of where the idea started. I think that another place that the idea probably subconsciously came to me was from Wallace & Grommit: a Grand Day Out. I’m a huge Wallace & Grommit fan and I’ve always loved that chunky, very cheesy look of the moon in that film. I have a feeling that psychologically, that’s where it came from, because the moon I drew was very chunky, you know great big craters – much bigger, much chunkier than they really should be. I have a feeling that’s where that came from. So yeah I mean there was no… there wasn’t any scientific reason that I did it, but once I made the decision to put it on the moon, I began really thinking about the science – why would they be there? I think I’ve talked about this extensively in my brain cast buy for those of you haven’t had the benefit of hearing me prattle on for hours about this…
Paul: If you’re not tuned into Steve Ogden’s brain: what are you waiting for?
Steve: Yeah… you poor things – uh… lucky things. So in the future I’ve developed, we have harvested the Earth – as it looks like we will do – we’ve harvested it for everything that it had. And uh, you know what’s the next thing we do? Well we ran off to the moon. We have begun uh… we set up this Luna 7 outpost up there, and we are now harvesting everything we can find in our local area and uh boiling it down to whatever we can pack onto these transports and send back to Earth, refining what could be refined on the moon. They’re trying to use the low gravity of the moon where possible and they’re even using the Lagrange Point for some special gravitational bonus – you know they can move things around without spending too much energy.
Paul: Wow.
Steve: This is kind of a side thing, one of the things that you notice about the moon: it’s much, much smaller than the actual Moon is. So like, our… the Moon moon is about a sixth the size of the Earth, and so your gravity is about a sixth of what it would be — if you’re standing on the Moon it would be a sixth of what it would be standing on Earth. Well, the one in Moon-Town‘s gotta be a 20th the size, it’s very very small, you know the craters are humongous, and the distance between the Earth and the moon is really really short… I mean you can – it’s like a car ride: you just hop in the shuttle and pop down to the Earth and back up to the moon. I put them very close together and I’m just taking huge liberties because I don’t want it to be… I didn’t want it to be that we had this realistic moon, this realistic Earth, and it takes 3 days to get from one to the other. I just, I can’t have it that way, and I didn’t wanna do… it seems ridiculous to go into hyper-space to go from the moon to the Earth, so I just said well.. I’m just gonna cheat the physics. And that comes from my experience as a 3D artist, you know, if something doesn’t work you just move ’em closer together, you know, there you go, I fixed it. But so anyway yeah, so once I got to that point, and I had to start dealing with this bizarre science, that moves the Lagrange Point to a really nice place between the Earth and the moon – it’s not too far away, and you can bring these asteroids in from the asteroid belt – which I’m sure is way, way too close, ’cause you could never do this – and you can park these asteroids in orbit between the Earth and the moon and still be close enough to get up there and do stuff to them and come back down and use the moon as the staging ground. So in a lot of ways I’ve invented an entirely new set of physics, but it’s based on reality, it’s just a shrunken reality.
Paul: Coming from an editing background, I can pace a shot because it’s got to do with timing. How do you pace a page, or a series of panels?
Steve: In my book it has to do with how long it takes your eye to take in the scenery. Something that’s very simple, you’ve got one tiny little spaceship and a bunch of stars – that’s gonna be a fairly quick thing for somebody to grab. Whereas something that has a lot of detail, there’s you know, four diggers lined up getting ready to go out a garage and you got a TV there, and you’ve got some words – words always slow you down – and you have a guy climbing up a ladder, he’s saying something back: that’s gonna slow things down. So: take the TV out, take the person climbing up the ladder out, and all of a sudden, it’s a different feel. But you also have to remember, just like when you’re editing a shot, you’re not just looking at the one shot – I mean, you are while you’re editing that one shot – but you’re also taking into account what comes before and what comes after. And then how long is it really gonna take your eye to take in what’s happening here.
Paul: I can totally forgive these panels for taking so long because we’ve had close ups of one character with nothing but stars behind her, or we’ve had a close up of a vid screen, but now we’re starting to get things that are very intricately detailed, I mean you’ve got these massive digging machines and there’s sort of cogs and wires and plates and nuts and bolts all over them and there’s also detail in the tires.
Steve: That’s been the big surprise, is how many people have this secret love of these gigantic digging machines. I’ve got more comments on that one garage shot – not the one where they’re lined up but the previous one, the double panel? My sister… my sister wrote me and she’s like, her husband, Tommy, she’s just, “Tommy wants one o’ those!” I bet he does, I mean you… I was making the joke the other day, like, so the diesel – it’s just that thing like, yeah, I want that thing! I want this huge thing that the tires are bigger than me, and it’s got a digger on there that might be bigger than my house, but I want it so it’s just such an appealing thing to think there’s this huge machine that you can be in control of. I don’t know what that appeal is, but it’s there.
Paul: I’m gonna give you one chance to pimp all your wares to the listeners, and then we might sort of, wrap this up.
Steve: Ok, well let’s see, the easiest thing for you to do would be to go to steve ogden dot com – spell my goofy last name O-G-D-E-N, so steveogden.com – that is the bright gateway to all things Steve Ogden, but you might wanna take the shortcut to Moon-Town Territory and go to moon dash town dot com.
Paul: An extended version of this interview will be available at www.theprocessdiary.blogspot.com on October 4. You can read Moon-Town right now by visiting www.moon-town.com. Music used in the podcast is used with permission, and credit goes to users SFX Bible and Warg from www.soundsnap.com For the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, my name is Paul Caggegi – thanks for listening.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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