First of all, this is my first topic on this forum, so hello everyone! I'm french-native and Hergé-fan. I also make some subtitles for documentaries about Hergé.
Hi christi ! I'm quiestce88, hope you remember me... We've discussed a bit about your project through YouTube. ;-)
Well, first I thought it might be useful to the others who are interested if I copied and pasted the message I wrote to you a few days ago on YouTube):
Concerning the designing principles of Hergé, there may a documentary film which could help you:
La Ligne Claire ("The clear line"). It explains an artistic and comics-related movement.
You can get some details about here on Wikipedia :
English articleFrench article, "Hergé" section, much more detailedAs is written in the French article, it's mostly at the end of his life that Hergé put in place this famous "Ligne claire".
Still, concerning the designing principles, you have to keep in mind that Hergé was always looking for "purity" for his albums, if not perfection... It led to quite difficult moments in his life, in the 1960s (it was the time when he started to elaborate his "clear line".
I hope I'm not too far from your first question.
Concerning his inspirations, well he had many, many documents (20,000 of them are still at the Studios Hergé, in the building where he worked at the end, in Brussels. On this subject, the book
Tintin: The Complete Companion by Michael Farr is great for seeing the relationships between Hergé's inspirations and what he drew afterwards. It's the same Michael Farr who talks about these similarities in the documentary
Tintin et moi.
So Hergé gathered a lot of documentation. For
The Red Sea Sharks, he spent some days in a boat to make sketches and to feel to rolling the same way as his characters! He frequently asked to some friends who traveled to take some photos or to grab some postcards for his reference.
Well, I've thought a bit about your subject. It's clear, I think, to note on your report that Hergé's inspiration were often indirect ones.
That's true, there are some buildings he made sketches of, directly, like the house of Professor Tarragon in
The Seven Crystal Balls, like someone said here.
But when you think about Soviet Russia, the Congo, Chicago and a lot of others, he was inspired by photos.
An interesting example of country is, I think, Syldavia. This fictional state has got a Balkan culture: look at its buildings, for instance.
It may be nice to speak about all Hergé's collaborators in your report: from the 1960s, his collaborators were often drawing the decors, some schemes for cars or planes, and of course the buildings (I'm speaking here about Bob de Moor, Jacques Martin and Roger Leloup, mainly).
I don't know if you intend to speak about the boats, it may be kind of interesting just to mention the works Hergé did to make them realistic.
Good luck for your work!