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| Before and After |
Am I being more shed? I am trying to be braver, and certainly to accept more challenges. I had made the film of the book, so why not the book of the film?..of an animation I made years ago, in Flash.
I can draw better now, (I thought) and I enjoyed the working process of making a series of finished images which would last longer than 1/25 of a second.
Actually, the best part of the film was the soundtrack, in particular the voiceovers by Paul (the voice of the shed) Baldwin, Julie McBean and Chris Moreland.
The picture book would not have the benefit of those so obviously, that was the challenge to go for. Having completed the drawings I immediately decided to redo them all in a more stylised way, which would have been impossible in an animation. Not that that would have stopped me trying.
Now that retirement from academia has removed the pressure to "publish"...it's playtime. And inevitably, it's also time to feel cut off from a creative community and flounder around eating too much cake, like Annie the main protagonist of The Sea. The story itself dates from the early 1990s, when I was seduced by the idea of a "wordprocessor" in the house. This led to a few short stories and the beginning of an epic but doomed fictional biography of my Great Aunt. Sometimes it is useful to explore a completely different medium -but mainly for the change of pace and the opportunity that affords for reflecting on how a story can be told... as much as asking WHY it should be told.
Annie took her feelings of cut-off-ness and sorrow and made magic out of them. Annie is definitely More Shed.
