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Origins

Dreg's world and his characters have developed over a period of four years. As I changed, so did the world. The world presented in this project (and its accompanying comic strip) is probably not final. Constantly things get added to it, or modified, and I'm not entirely sure whether it will every turn into anything concrete, or eventually just die out.

I started creating this world during my last year of high school. I wrote a (very bad) book called Disarea. The world is quite similar to that of the film and comic strip, though it has no governmental structure, and is considerably more violent. Dreg is very different. He is human, and one of the worst elements of the book; his character is not at all well defined, and I fell into the trappings of sci-fi; super-hero like characters, and a tendency towards melodrama. The problem is that I wrote the book mainly for the world it was set in; this vast, limitless structure with the fractured gravity, rather than anything resembling plot or any decent characterization.

But the book did sow the seeds of this project. After writing the book, I thought that would be it for Disarea and its inhabitants. My biggest problem with the book was its teenage obsession with violence and the fact it took itself far too seriously. I then wrote a second book, which personally I prefer though generally is regarded as simply too silly, and a little repetitive. But the world it is set in is a little more believable, with a working political structure and conflicting interests of characters and groups of people. It also contained some fun characters, and Pendy (who figures considerably in the comic strip) came from that novel. At around the same time, I also tried to re-write the first novel, but with a few radical differences, notably in Dreg's character. But I never managed to finish it, again because I had no real plot to hold everything together.

When I moved to Bournemouth, I began working on a third novel. This one was much more ambitious than the previous two. It was still science fiction, but with a very complex political system, with several countries and conflicts. It was to follow three different characters; the king of a small, but rich country considered backward by many other nations, the ambassador from a more powerful country that has come to iron out problems that have arisen recently, and a young, poor man from the country who eventually gets involved in a revolutionary movement. I only managed to write sixty pages of this novel before I gave up; I had difficulties keeping the tone I wanted, and I simply don't know enough to write about this kind of thing. Though I have recycled this story to fit into Dreg's world, and hopefully it will come back in comic book form...

As much as I enjoy writing, I don't think that I'm a natural born author. Both my first novels were extremely rich in speech and severely lacking in narrative. They were also filled with action scenes that the written word simply can not effectively convey. I think I'm more in my element in a visual medium. Naturally I dreamed of being able to animate or film some of the more visual scenes.

The most obvious such example is the chapter from the first book that my major project is based on. The various jumps to different gravity fields is just confusing when read, though make sense when you see them. It is a scene which really should be visual. In fact, as I wrote the scene I felt that I should animated it. I've had the desire to make this film for four years now.

I had several problems with animating this film. I tried a couple of times before, but the fact that I had no idea what Dreg looked like made it very difficult for me to get to grips with the film. I was confident with regards to the action, seeing as it is almost completely taken from the book.

Some time last year, I began dreaming of making an animated series for Dreg. So many ideas were coming together now that I had a wealth of material I could use. Somehow, deciding it was an animated series opened things up for me, and really helped me find the tone for the world. Because I was no longer thinking in terms of a novel, but visually, Dreg's current form came to me, almost complete, very quickly. I don't know why I decided he should be half human, but I've never looked back. I like the way he looks now, and it has also helped me finally pin down his personality.

Also around this time, I finally admitted to people around me how much I like comic strips (something I was secretly ashamed of for a long time). I'm not talking about the American ComiX, but the European graphic novels which are amazing artistic, narrative and conceptual achievements. The advantage being that they require less people and time than films, so they can often go much further than the movie industry does. It was my dad's casual suggestion that I try to make a small one that really revived my interest in Disarea. Characters from all three books have now been amalgamated together, if slightly modified, in a new, more interesting world. The comic strip I'm working on for the innovations project is hopefully only a start, because there is an entire story, and several more characters I hope to bring to life.

This means that now I have a much more concrete world to set the film in. The idea behind my major project is a short introduction to an episode in this imagined series; often there'll be a two minute introduction in television series before the opening credits come up. That is how I imagine this film; it is designed to capture the audience's interest and make them watch on, without necessarily saying anything important.

That is of course my biggest problem with the film; it feels somewhat shallow, being simply an action sequence. I feel almost that I am betraying the characters and all the work I've been doing to make such a superficial film, which is why I attach so much importance to the comic strip. But there is a certain degree of my wanting to get this film “out of my system”, seeing as its been there for so long.

As for the future of Disarea, I have no idea where it will go. I keep on waiting for me to lose interest; I don't think it's the best idea I've had, nor the best collection of characters. But I think its having endured this long has given it an existence beyond my own mind, and somehow seems greater than just an idea. It seems almost organic in the way it evolves and changes, with very little conscious effort on my part. I'm interested to see what it turns into, if anything.