reMIND

I had this idea to make a 2 minute animation about a cat almost 10 years ago.

It was going to be a simple music video but things got way out of hand. I spent many hours daydreaming and storyboarding it to perfection and it turned into a 15 minute film idea. Then I started learning After Effects and I spent the next three years of my spare time making 10 minutes of badly executed animation. Not only that, it was only the first quarter of the story.  I decided to take my cat film and turn it into a 5 minute section of a full feature film. But why would I want to spend all the time mastering a small scene of a movie that no one would understand out of context.

A year or so later a friend and mentor suggested making it into a graphic novel and it all clicked.  I scrapped the long slow animation project and rewrote the story to be a graphic novel.  Now I could tell my whole story from start to finish and not worry about who to cast for voice overs.  And even if I suck at pitching it to a studio I would still have my completed story to call my own.

In my graphic novel journey I've come across may obstacles including time, money and the day job.  Oh yeah, and I just had my first child in 2009.  SOOOooooo, I decided to start this blog were I can post my progress instead of worrying about keeping it top secret until it's released.  I have a bunch of finished pages I can post and lots of sketches.  All the dialogue is temporary until it goes to print so you will probably see lots of typos and continuity problems.  The full story is turning out to be about 300 pages and so I've decided to make a two part series.  I plan to publish it hard-bound and sparing no expense making it look really good.

I also decided to share my process and things I've learned along the way while developing reMIND.  Through my journey I found out that not many people understand what it takes to make a complete graphic novel from start to finish and I hope this can become a place where others along this same journey can come to find comfort, encouragement, friends, tools, techniques and tutorials.  I hope to spare anyone the slow painful learning curve that I had to go through if they decide to make their own Graphic Novel.  After all, we need to get some new stuff out there.  I'm sick of finding the same old GN's at the local bookstores.  Let's make something new!