All my life I’ve loved stories.
As a child if you did not literally glue the books shut I would read them. From romance novels to encyclopedias, I read everything. I was a loner child; and books provided a much needed escape from a world I didn’t think I’d ever understand.
As every reader does I started building a genre preference, and my particular poison was fantasy. I loved stories of magic and of power. Spending hours lost in worlds where you could speak to animals, cast spells and ride dragons. Books were my escape and the more different a world was from what I call our “boring reality” the better of I felt.
Those books filled with me a sense of wonder, one that I never lost.
Then I started watching TV, and of course my favorite movies and shows were the ones that echoed the sense of wonder that I grew up reading. And no type of entertainment does a better job at creating wonder than animation. From cartoons to anime, I found stories that I could completely lose myself in.
It was only a matter of time before I started writing and drawing myself.
And my stories, like the ones I fed my brain for so may years were about things and places that do not exist in our world. I wrote about people who could control the elements, about ghosts, about telepaths. I drew assassins and sorcerers, but it was always just a hobby, something I did that wasn’t to be shared with the world. I was a good Nigerian child. And good Nigerian children grow up to be doctors and engineers. Not writers and artists.
So I put away my childish sense of wonder and got down to the business adulting
Now almost a decade later, I realized that those stories are still in me. And a small fragile part of me wants to get them out. I want to create the same sense of wonder in others that helped me get through the hardest parts of my childhood. I want to go back to my roots.
Unfortunately, the skills that came so easy to me as a youth, have turned decrepit after years of abandon and disuse.
So I need to relearn everything from the ground up. I want learn how to write, tell, draw and animate a story from the ground up. And I want to show others how to do it as well. So I decided to pick an ambitious goal for 2021.
I’m going to animate a 1 minute video from one of my favorite stories by the end of 2021
It’s may not sound ambitious, but remember that each single frame in an animation is drawn. Which means that at a frame rate of 24 frames per second a single minute of animation s 1,440 drawings. And that’s just for the finished work. It doesn’t include any of work that’s going to go into learning how to draw, to write and to animate.
Also I’m still an adult, with a super demanding job that I love. So I can’t spend every waking moment drawing and writing. But this is something I love, and it’s going to be worth losing a couple of hours of sleep.
So why are you reading this…?
Well I’ve decided to document this journey.
That job I mentioned? Well they’re super into documenting journeys and processes. And time I’ve realized just how valuable being able to share a roadmap to how you did something is. So thanks to the inspiration of F.Merry , who’s also doing something similar, I’m going to document my journey.
I can’t promise I’ll always be consistent, but I will share everything I’m learning and hopefully some of my work samples. I’m hoping documenting this journey will help keep me accountable.
A simple request
I feel weird writing this … but I’m going to anyway. If you’ve gotten this far then would you mind following me? Each new follow reminds me that there are actually people interested in this journey, and inspires me to push harder. Also I love feedback … feel free to send me resources, videos and tutorials, or let me know what I’m doing wrong or right in the comments.
You can follow me personally if you’re interested in all the ramblings that fall out of my head, or you can just follow the Kaliu.co publication I’ve created especially for this series. I’m excited to start this journey… are you?
Next up: Picking the story
