A few years I ago I started writing a story for an anthology based on Australian Fairy Tales. The theme was facinating and I decided to write mine based on a tale called “The Giant Who Had No Heart In Its Body”. I was really engaged and kept fleshing out the characters and the world. By this time I wrote beyond the word count and restrictions for the anthology, but decided to keep writing the story for myself.
Like many other writers, I would write, edit it, and put it away and work on other things, until I could resolve things and return to make make the story cleaner.
This project extended into animation as well. I’m a visual thinker, so I always draw when I write to help me visualise the characters and story. As this was happening, I wondered, What would this story look like as an animation? I played around designing different elements of the story.
Creating a full animated feature is incredibly expensive and time consuming. I felt that it would be unreasonable to make a secondary project bigger than the main project (writing), so I narrowed my scope into designing a trailer animation that captured key elements of the story and could serve to support the writing. From there, I drew some storyboards of interesting scenes from the book and arranged them into an animatic.
My friend Thandi, a professional journalist, came to visit me one day and did some voice recording for me. Not only is she one of the funnest people in the world, but Thandi is an incredible voice talent! I asked her to channel her inner ABC news reader and she knocked it out of the park and did a great recording in two takes.
After that, I drew casually. I saw this animated project as an experiment. I didn’t want to commit too much time and energy to it, yet I also wanted to get better at animating with more details. I experimented with shadows, lighting and time of day, paraellaxing and adding dimention to flat drawings, and experimenting with ‘glitch-y’ old tv aesthetics, which I’ve been incorporating into my still illustrations.
Some of the storyboards changed, others stayed the same. I stayed flexible to new ideas and adapting for better flow and timing.
Finishing the animation actually inspired me to look at the story again. In someways I can be a perfectionist. I realised that I can continue to edit and change this story for forever, or accept that it’s finished and release it into the world. With that I looked up e-publishing options.
I had perviously gone with self-publishing for physical books, but that cost over $13,000 at the time. I wasn’t happy with the previous publishing company and wanted a easier route. I’ve never done e-book publishing on my own before, but I figured that I’d give it a go and try. (as opposed to never trying). Long story short, I finally finished another story (yay!)
While hiking with her brothers, Jordan gets lost in the Australian bush, only to later discover that they were turned to stone by a Giantess. Aided by Timberland, a boy kept prisoner by the Giantess, the two search for the villainesses’ heart and the source of her power in order to revive her brothers. This Australian fantasy story is based on a the Scandinavian fairy tale, “The Giant Who Had No Heart in its Body”, which was included in a collection called “East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Old Tales from the North.”
The Giant’s heart
Here is the final animated trailer. Please have a look and tell me what you think.
Here are the links to e-book as well. I’d appreciate it if you could buy a copy and help get it ranked higher on the maket place. If you like it, please leave a review and let me know.
Other Videos –> WORK IN PROGRESS:
