Friday at Comic-Con International: San Diego, I spent time at the Wired Cafe at the Omni Hotel as guests of iStock Photo, to chat with them about their latest project involving comics and the power of crowdsourcing. Sona from iStock Feast explained what the project was all about.
“iStock launched a creative site called Feast at feast.istockphoto.com. It was launched last September, and what we decided to do is that every month we take a different theme… and for July and August we’re really focusing on illustration because illustration really is a way to tell a great story. And so what we decided to do as a way to symbolize that, we decided to bring ten of our best stock illustrators together to do a progressive comic book over the next ten weeks. And so these guys are basically going to progressively illustrate a comic book, and what we’re doing here at the Wired Cafe is we’re launching it, we’re asking people who are visiting Wired Cafe to vote on the backbone of the story – the heroes, the villains, the problems, the love interest of course. And so what we’ll do is we’ll check them out and look at their votes, and we’ll also ask them to submit ideas and we’ll pull some of the coolest ideas together along with the most popular ideas ad we’ll send them back to the illustrators and those guys will start to illustrate starting August 1st.”
I asked how people could follow the comic’s progress. “July 25th we’re going to unveil the results at feast.istock.iphoto.com as well as all the bios of the illustrators, and then August 1st they’ll be able to check it out online. So each week they can see a piece at feast.istockphoto.com and check it out or they can follow us at @feast_byistock on Twitter and we’ll definitely be tweeting out as soon as the panels become available.”
When asked why Feast thought comic books might be a good way for Feast to go, Sona said, “We were thinking about illustration trends, since illustration has really come back into the creative world like with quite the force everywhere. So we thought, there’s info graphics, there’s all the web elements, so we thought that going back to what we all do as creatives is tell stories. And we thought comic books are one of the most powerful ways to tell a story. We’ve all had exposure to comic books. I mean I grew up reading ARCHIE and whatnot, but you know, I visited cousins across the world who also read comics and so it’s really kind of a global thing and it’s really back to basics. So we thought it would be cool to bring these stock illustrators to do something that’s really about storytelling and illustrations.”
I then asked Sona what drew her into being in this business and working for iStock. “I used to be a book designer and I used to typeset. I was one of those people who could look at fonts and say ‘oh they’re using Helvetica’ and I’d go to the movie and identify fonts. So I was really into book design but I kind of wanted to do more than just design. iStock Photo is based in Calgary and there aren’t a lot of creative jobs in Calgary, Canada, it’s an oil town. So when those come up you go for them right? iStockphoto began in 2000, we pioneered the microstock industry and we’re still going strong twelve years later.”
As to people ‘s reactions about the project who visited the Wired Cafe, Sona explained, “They’re really pumped about it. This is really cool. We thought it was a great idea, but you never really know until you take it out to the people and ask them. When we tell them ‘hey we’re doing this collective comics project and you get to participate by helping to build the backbone’ they get so excited. Everyone’s like ‘oh this is so cool’ so they started voting and they’re really just excited by some if the options, some of the heroes are a kitten, a mad scientist, but people are putting in their own ideas. I’ve seen someone put in Facebook as the love interest. We’e seen everything from Anne Frank to Facebook as the love interest. It’s a lot of quirky idea, but people here are just really excited about telling stories and so they’re quite excited about it all.”
Lastly I asked Sona what she hopes readers get from the whole experience. “I hope they get to feel like they’re a part of creating something. iStockphoto is a creative community. so wee get juiced just by helping people be creative and be a part of the creative process. So we hope they get some satisfaction but also see how illustration can be such a powerful part of storytelling. technique.”
A complete digital edition of the comic book will be available the end of September available through their website, and if things go really well they would consider a print edition.
I concluded the interview getting to place my own votes at the Wired Cafe for this intriguing crowdsourcing project. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out and what the reading experience will be. Follow my “Professional to Professional” coverage for more about Comic-Con International: San Diego 2012!
