Liam looking to the bigger picture as he retires ‘Martin’
HE has kept us all entertained with his bitingly funny and acutely observed insights into Irish family life that have struck a chord with people across the country.
Now Liam Hallihan, the Mallow man behind the YouTube cartoon sensation ‘Martin’s Life’ is setting his sights on something more ambitions and has revealed to The Corkman that he intends to put pen to paper on something bigger and better.
Speaking at last Friday’s Cork Person of the Year awards in the Rochestown Park Hotel, Liam said Martin has now been officially retired and he intended to start work on an exciting new project.
“People have been asking me when the next ‘Martin’s Life’ will be coming out. I just want to say now that I will not be doing anymore of them,” confirmed Liam.
“The plan is to make a comedy cartoon series of possibly 10, half-hour episodes, but it is going to take a year or so to do that. It’s not something that is going to happen imminently,” he said.
Aside from the fact that the 34-year-old Dublin-based civil servant has a full-time job there is another very good reason that this will not be done in any great hurry.
Liam, quite candidly, admits that he never actually enjoyed the process of writing and editing the seven ‘Martin’s Life’ cartoons he has created. He said there could be hours or “even weeks” of long and laborious work go into each of the minute-long episodes.
“To be honest it’s a slow and horrible process. I enjoy the sketches when they are all finished, but I found the whole process rewriting each one ten times over, doing the voices and then listening back to them over and over again tortuous,” he admitted.
“I would then test each of them with my girlfriend Clare and if she laughs, it was only then that I knew I had something and it was all worth it.”
Liam’s admission that he did not enjoy the process of creating each ‘Martin’s Life’ cartoon begs one question – why do it in the first place?
He said he had always enjoyed writing for himself and decided to write the first ‘Martin’s Life’ sketch about the ESB when he was in New Zealand, as he put it “travelling around and acting the eejit”, in 2004.
“I wanted to write something funny and bring different concepts into my writing. Then it kind of ran into this Martin fella with his parents and I went with that because people kind of related to it,” he said.
“It’s was not just based on my parents alone, it’s about everyone’s parents and some of the things I see and hear when I visit friends houses. The idea was not taken from anything else I has seen. Rather I looked at the stuff that was out there and through to myself I could do better than that,” said Liam.
While the cartoons may not have been an overnight success, he was proved right with the concept winning awards in the US, becoming an internet sensation and earning Liam the March 2016 Cork Person of the Month award.
For now though, Liam has no intention of giving up the day job to write full-time.
“I love the idea of writing it in my spare time and don’t really see it as a full-time career. To be honest you would have to make a lot of rubbish to make the kind of money you need to do something big that you could afford to spend a lot of time at. I don’t want to go down that route,” said Liam.
“I will keep on writing away in my own time, and I would also like to look at writing something away from cartoons in the future, maybe a play, but that is something for the future,” he added.