I’ve been thinking a lot about an old project lately, one that almost took off in a big way. Farmageddon began life way back in 1991 as The Funny Farm, a daily newspaper strip in my hometown newspaper. It was created by my school friend Gordon Fraser and me as a way for us to flex our creative muscles. Gordon drew the strip, I inked it and we both wrote it (sometimes together, sometimes separably). We had a lot of fun with it and let our imaginations run wild. Even though the strip was set on a farm, we quickly populated it with talking dinosaurs, time-travelling inventors and visiting aliens. It lasted for two years before a new editor of the local paper decided to axe it.
But the Funny Farm didn’t end there. We developed it as an animated TV show and we went to the Annecy Animation Festival where it was optioned by Nelvana, a Canadian animation production company. It felt like we’d hit the jackpot! We talked about moving to Canada to be story editors and exec producers on the show, but it never went into production. The excitement faded and we went on with our lives. But years later the chance came to revisit it and do some more work on it. I was running my own animation studio and thought it’d be great to develop the Funny Farm, now re-titled as Farmageddon. We created 3D models of the characters, locations and props, and started to do some animation tests. You can take a look at our development blog from that time here.
We managed to secure some development money and we took the project to Cannes.
We had plenty of interest but, for lots of reasons, we never quite managed to get it off the ground, and it remains an itch that I didn’t quite manage to scratch. I miss working on it, and I miss playing with the ideas with Gordon, his devious sense of humour was a deep well of creativity. So, Farmageddon is almost thirty years old now and its still there in the back of my mind, just waiting for its day in the sun.
Farmageddon from Qurios on Vimeo.
