One child at a time
PCYC manager Justin Abrahams knows only too well the challenges facing youngsters growing up in a disadvantaged community. After 23 years delivering compassion and support to those on Struggle Street, he probably helped some of their parents, too
Comedian Tim Logan has suddenly found himself named as the director of an animated comedy series and is still unsure whether to be elated or terrified. “It sounds like a lot of work, which is something I’ve spent my whole life actively trying to avoid,” he says. “But also I don’t like the idea of someone else telling me what to do, so maybe I’m better off being the one directing the other actors.”
Adapted from the popular online comic strips of the same name, Moments of Clarity is a series of one-minute animated vignettes drawing their humour from topics like pedestrian crossing etiquette, mental health, and misunderstanding pop culture, starring an animated version of Logan and his little dog, Ra.
Logan has a long-held fascination with life’s unspoken etiquettes and awkward life lessons, which have formed the basis for a lot of his stand-up comedy.
He teamed up with fellow Hobartian, cartoonist Jess Murray, to co-create a web comic called Moments of Clarity, Murray’s drawings proving to be the perfect vehicle for conveying Logan’s words and thoughts in a visual way.
And now, coming off the back of the comic strip’s popularity and a couple of experimental animated webisodes, Logan and Murray have received funding from Screen Australia to produce another 24 short animated episodes of the series.
For 39-year-old Logan — who cut his teeth in Hobart’s comedy club scene a decade ago, when it was still as raw as he was — co-creating an animated series is the dream job he never knew he wanted.
And for 20-year-old Murray, who is studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, in Sydney, it has been a fortuitous opportunity to break into the world of filmmaking that she has always aspired to.
“I always wanted to make movies since I was about 12, when I saw Edward Scissorhands,” she says. “I loved it, but it always seemed unrealistic. Before that, I wanted to be an architect, but then I found out you had to be good at maths, so I stuck to drawing, cartooning. I just love to draw.”
Originally from Sydney, Logan moved to Hobart with his family as a teenager, saying the move was a particularly hard one for a teen from a big city in the 1990s.
“There were only two TV channels in Hobart at the time,” he says. “That was a real issue for me at the time, but you have no perspective at that age. But I’ve noticed that the thing about Hobart is that if you grow up there, by the time you’re 18 or 20 you just want to get out and move to Melbourne or Sydney.
“And later you probably want to move back because you realise what you’re missing. But when you’re from somewhere else, like I was, it’s about that age that you suddenly realise how much you love the place.”
But for the aspiring young comedian, Hobart did have one glaring deficit — no stand-up comedy scene.
He remembers being in university in the early 2000s and watching the small handful of comedians at the time, who made up that first generation of comics working in Hobart.
“There was like two or three comedians around at the time. Finn Kruckemeyer came down from Adelaide and was doing comedy here, Mick Lowenstein was doing it as well. There was this little handful of them, and the Hobart Comedy Festival once a year, but that was it, there was no scene.
“When I started out there were a few rooms starting up in places like the New Sydney and the Republic, which was great.
“In 2005 I did Raw Comedy in Hobart and made it through to the national final. That was the year Josh Thomas won. You don’t even realise how terrified you’re going to be until you step out onto that stage. You might have only done two or three gigs by that stage and then bang, out in front of 1000 people.
“But that was just when that big new wave of Tasmanian comedians started appearing and getting noticed — people like Hannah Gadsby, Luke McGregor, Ted Wilson — and that period is now being seen as the golden age of comedy in Tassie.
“But the other thing I noticed was that a lot of them ended up leaving the state, especially those up north like Josh Earl, Hannah Gadsby and The Bedroom Philosopher, I think because there just wasn't enough work for them in the north of Tassie.
But luckily that’s changed now and there is a great regular comedy scene in Hobart and Launceston these days.”
Soon after kicking off his comedy career, Logan started working with Hobart director Shaun Wilson, starring in and writing a number of shorts, including the acclaimed Tasmanian comedy series Noirhouse.
It was also around this time that he realised he could com
bine his knack for stand-up with writing for other media, like film and TV. “I always wanted to write. Until I did Raw I never really thought about performing until someone actually gave me that validation, then I realised I could do it.
“So now with Moments of Clarity I can write a joke and turn it into dialogue, then perform it and then it gets turned into an animated clip. So it’s everything, the perfect combination, the dream job I didn’t know I wanted.”
In late 2017 Logan had the idea for turning his stand-up material into a three-panel comic strip, like the ones he used to love reading as a kid. The only problem was, he couldn’t draw. So he started looking online for someone who could.
He stumbled across some commissioned pieces Murray had posted online and realised he really liked her particular style.
“I knew immediately that her work was what I wanted the comic to look like, so I sent her a message asking if she was interested in drawing a strip if I came up with the words and the joke.
“I was very upfront about it. I said there wouldn’t be any money involved, just that it might be fun. And she agreed. I started sending her scripts and she started sending back character sketches and comic strips and it all came together really quickly. We work so well together.”
They started producing around one comic strip a week, sharing them via a Tumblr page and a Facebook page, and Moments of Clarity quickly took off. The pair even joked about turning it into an animation.
Then, at the start of this year, they started talking to Hobart animation studio Blue Rocket about how they might do just that. And with some support from Screen Tasmania, they produced three one-minute episodes, just to see how it would look.
Producer Paul Moran happened to be looking for a solo project to produce and immediately saw the potential in Moments of Clarity, but he had a condition for Logan to meet.
“He said he wanted me to direct it and voice the character that was based on me! I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do that, but figured I’d give it a go.
“As for directing the other actors, all the shows are in my head anyway so I know how it should sound, so it’s just a matter of getting the beats and the conversation right, then it’s over to the animaters.”
And the gamble certainly paid off, with Screen Australia agreeing to fund a further 24 episodes, which are already in production.
Murray now has the title of “production designer” and is loving her first foray into creating an animated series.
“I draw all the characters from different angles and design them and the background and the props. I draw everything and then the studio uses those to create the animation. I love animation, and I have this plan to make my own stop-motion film. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson’s films and he does animation as well as live action filmmaking, so he’s an inspiration for me.”
Logan’s Melbourne comedy career also proved fruitful when it came to securing a top notch voice cast for the series.
Fellow Hobart comedian Luke McGregor is an old mate and was keen to be involved, and Sydney comedian and Triple J announcer Gen Fricker was also excited to lend her voice to a character.
“One time she did 20 minutes of alternate takes on the one line because she was having so much fun,” Logan says. “We actually had to intervene to stop her from riffing and she keeps asking when she can come back to do more.”
Murray, who grew up in Kingston, now lives in Sydney, where she is studying her Bachelor of Arts in screen production at AFTRS, so with Logan currently based in Melbourne, a lot of their collaboration takes place by phone and email.
But with such a solid rapport and a clear shared vision of their work, they have found this works very well for them.
Nonetheless, they are both still madly in love with Hobart and return home often. Logan is still a producer at Hobart’s Clubhouse comedy club and is in town for one week of every month.
“People in Tassie still think I live there, that’s how frequently I’m there,” he laughs. “I moved to Melbourne to chase the comedy gigs but I still have to come back to Hobart all the time to see friends and family and go to my favourite places.”
And both will be spending quite a bit of time in Hobart over the summer and early next year in order to get the new web series finished in time for an expected April release.
The original three episodes they made a year ago were never publicly released and will be added to the upcoming 24 to make a 27-episode season that will be released online a couple of episodes at a time.
“We decided not to release them all at once because then people might want to binge on the whole lot at once and I think that’s bad for storytelling,” Logan says.
“I think something like this works better if you give people some time in between to process it and think about it. It allows people to talk about it in between, and there are some topics and themes covered that I think deserve to be discussed a little more.
“And releasing a few at a time also gives it a longer lifespan, builds some anticipation and encourages people to share them and keep passing them around. And hopefully we get to make some more!”
Moments of Clarity is also a way of granting a kind of immortality to someone very dear to Logan’s heart — Ra the little dog is very real.
“Yes, she’s real, my relationship with her is very real, and whenever I’m deluding myself about something I find myself looking at her face, and there’s something in the way she looks back at me that snaps me out of it.
“The first episode of the strip, and the first episode of the animated series, is about me dealing with the idea of her mortality, which is something that really happened.
“I said to her: I’ll put you in a comic strip. It’s a way of making sure I will always have her with me. And also I think her fluffy little face will be adorable on merchandise.”
You can find the Moments of Clarity comic strip online at momentsofclaritycomic.tumblr.com or www.facebook.com/TheseAreMomentsOfClarity. The Moments of Clarity animated series – comprising 27 one-minute episodes – is currently in production, and is expected to be released online in March or April next year.
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