Thursday, January 17, 2008

Newstory

My main comic has now been started and put up, Newstory.
The purpose for this comic, is really to act as an experiment and as a way for me to learn a bit about what works and what doesn't. Also to challenge myself artistically with each page. With each page I'll try to do something different, different camera angle, different posture for a character to be in and hopefully a general refinement of character looks and appearances.
I'm also aiming to create a buffer for this comic, so that I shouldn't have any trouble updating it from now on. Also one friend has offered to colour it in with pencils, so I may have coloured versions going up as well.
I'm still planning on going back to Tales From the Lettuce Patch, with as I believe I have previously mentioned a story me and a friend wrote together, that sorta takes the path of one person the other writes something, and is basically an extended conversation similar to what me and my friend did during secondary college, though we never wrote those down.
The advantage of this and the problem I faced with the original Tales, is that it gives me a ready made script that I have to adapt to comic form, rather then my original practise of trying to come up with something remotely funny on the spot while in the middle of drawing the strip.
I do storyboards for newstory and have a basic summary of what happens in each chapter, though I am currently thinking of expanding it to 6 chapters long (150 pages)to stop it from going to fast for a reader to follow.
I'll get around to finishing the Newstory homepage at some point.

On other news I have a second round interview for my course now, so I still will most likely get into it, as long as I present well during the interview. Though with a Cert IV under my belt I should be able to get in easily. Oh and I am now a Certificate IV IT multimedia specialist, and a certificate IV project manager. I may have to cut my hair for this interview, or at least get it trimmed. I'm rather fond of having my hair long well at least longish, as you can tell if you read Tales From the lettuce patch, most of the time I portray myself with long hair.
Anyways other then that, work is really starting to hurt, you have four people doing spring onions over a period of 3 hours.
If they can mange 40 an hour each that's 160 an hour, over three hours they should have done, 480. Instead they had done 250 after me and my sister had spent 3 to 4 hours cutting zucchini, we were pretty much ready to go home and be done with work for the day. Instead we ended up slaving away for another four hours on the bastard plants, I can deal with Zucchini or Spring Onions, not both at once, thats pushing me too far...however with zucchini an average load gets back on average maybe $300 but costs in employee costs around $250
Each spring onion costs around 90c to $1.10 if a worker can churn out 40 an hour they are more then covering their own employment costs.
Then you bring lettuce into the equation.
Ten bins of lettuce is about $1000, that can take up to two hours to do with eight workers depending on the crop being harvested, some times can take an hour, each employee costs about $12 an hour (this is an average due to large age gaps in some workers) thats $96 to $182 in labor for a $1000 dollar deal, add into that the costs of planting and maintaing said plants, say around $400 and you still have a net profit of $400 to $500 dollars.
With the math in place lettuce are obviously the best vegetable to harvest money wise, and kids as young as fourteen can be taught how to pick them, which saves a huge amount in employee costs.

Well I went off topic there, five years on the job and you think I've learnt nothing? Bah to that, I also end up being the leader when FC or the great boss isn't around, due to having five years of experience and a bit of an idea how to manage other people. I've also had some limited teaching experience.(around 20 days)
Anyways that is more then enough from me...
Sayonara folks check out my site if you want!

2 comments:

Richard said...

You should write a book, Fry. People need to know about the HARVEST MONEY WISE

Eledor said...

Sorry got carried away, it was a way of venting frustration about having to cut plants that cut back, not something I regularly enjoy