What prompted us to think that making a Hopeless Maine black and white filmA Hopeless Film was a good idea? Let me tell you a story…

It started at Pagan Pride in Nottingham, in the summer of 2018. We stayed with Cat Treadwell, which was a wonderful thing to get to do. She was having a bit of a clear out, and we came home with a box set of Greta Garbo DVDs.

My maternal grandmother was a great fan of Greta Garbo, so this had pushed some nostalgia buttons for me. Garbo was one of the few actors to make the transition from silent films to talkies, and some of the films in the box set were silent.

Watching these films together, Tom and I were struck by the technical similarities between comics and silent films. There’s less space for text in a silent film, making the interplay between what’s done as an image and what is words closer to comics than to modern film, I reckon. Facial expressions are super-important in both forms, and often more stylised than naturalistic.

We spent a lot of time talking about all of this, initially just because it interested both of us. We were wondering what we could learn from silent films that would help us as comics creators. Somewhere in those conversations, Tom said something to the effect that he thought The Blind Fisherman would make an excellent black and white silent movie in the style of these period pieces. I agreed, and at the time that seemed to be the whole of it.

But of course it wasn’t.

So we feel it is entirely reasonable to hold Cat Treadwell responsible for being the catalyst that started this whole idea. You can find Cat’s Hopeless Maine story here – https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/threads/

And find Cat here – https://druidcat.wordpress.com/