Story Lab, Vipassana, CartoonBrew

Hello. How are you? Nice? Oh ok. Well, that’s nice. Me? Oh, I’m just nice too thanks. Please – come inside, take your shoes off and sit on the kitchen floor while I ruminate on recent events.

So, I did the Triggerfish Storylab. I entered two projects, one of them being my 13-year old comic duo ‘Bru & Boegie’ and was able to pitch it as both a series and a film. Well, let me tell you, it was a flippen’ rad 2 weeks. Shoh.

So, Pilar Alessandra came from LA. She wrote this book ‘The Coffee Break Screen Writer’. It’s a great book that helps you to go through various exercises and questions to get to the meat and bones of your script. I read about half the book while I was in pre-production on Moosebox, Triggerfish had a copy I was borrowing. But, she came and talked to us for a week in the flesh. Man. That was awesome. We got to apply the exercises to our projects, wrote two pages of script that we read out in the class, and the whole thing was super interactive. So – great. I was amazed at how on the ball she was. Sometimes when someone would explain their story, I only have a limited amount of space in my brain for a few characters and what they’re doing when first hearing about a concept, so I skew towards easy-to-understand concepts where story and plot stuff doesn’t get too much in the way of what the essence of the thing is. However, she had a way of giving feedback that was really on point, in a way that she couldn’t have just been winging it. eg if someone said “My project is about a guy and another guy, but the one guy is from this other place and there’s a dragon who also knows this other girl who is involved with this guy, and the other friend of them who lives with the dragon’s friend, the other girl, all go about doing their thing is this place that’s similar to this other place that’s also like …” so I’m already going glassy-eyed and Pilar would say “Ok, so, maybe you could try x, y and z” and I’d be like “Yo. How’d you process that?”

Then, Orion Ross from Disney came to chat to us about series, and that too exceeded my hopes. He got very specific about stuff, we got to see some unreleased Disney stuff, and he kind of covered series specifics without being too particular to Disney which was cool. Also, very interactive – we each got to pitch each other’s characters which was a good exercise in seeing how universally translatable a character is. Then we went through various stages of pitching, and again he provided feedback on the spot and I think a lot of creators pulled their socks up after getting an honest opinion. In South Africa we’re sometimes terribly polite to one another and may not get to the heart of an issue even if we have potentially valuable feedback to offer. Well, I guess I speak for myself there, but I think having an industry person there like Orion with experience where superfluous niceties may not be in everybody’s interest was good.

Ya. Good stuff. I think anyone who was there got an upskill in various areas whether they liked it or not. Would be great to get more people like Orion and Pilar over here to knock us into shape a bit and I think we’re hungry to learn too.

Triggerfish also put a bunch of us up in Claremont, in a flippen’ mansion. Yoh. There were 35 – 40 people at the Story Lab from all over Africa, so we got to meet lank cool peeps from Kenya, Zambia, a dude from Nigeria, Zim etc… Was great.

Then, bro’s, I did this 10-day meditation retreat called ‘Vipassana‘. Yoh. What a thing. It’s a 10-day meditation retreat (this one was outside Cape Town in Worcester) where there’s ‘noble silence’ for 10 days, which means no talking to one another, no eye contact, no gesturing – no communication at all. Also, no books to read, no sketchbooks, no music – you’re there really to eat (2 meals per day, vegetarian, delicious), sleep (wake up at 4am, sleep at 9:30pm) and spend 10 days learning and practicing this meditation technique called ‘Vipassana’ which focuses on observing the body’s breath and observing sensations on the body – no hocus pocus really. Wow. Was amazing – tough, but mostly amazing. Halfway through day 1 I was like ‘ah geez, this is gonna be a flippen’ mal slow 10 days’ and sometimes it was. But, on the 9th day, I felt inner nibanic bliss – after sitting for hours and hours and hours during the previous days and experiencing gross bolidy sensations like a sore back, sore knees etc… all the pains melted away and it felt like my body was made of pure honey, and fluid (not solid at all). I kind of popped some tear-juice it felt so good. So, that was nice. But the aim of it isn’t to chase the high – it’s more about purifying the mind and releasing past ‘sankaras’ – deeply etched beliefs, cravings and aversions that don’t serve us any longer and only multiply our suffering by taking us away from the moment. Breaking the mind-body habit of just reacting to sensations like a little tickle on the nose or a fly landing on you, apparently helps to disassociate from reaction and see things more like how they really are. And to develop equanimity of mind. Better for me, better for others.

Also, check this rad Moosebox pic Daniel Snaddon, co-director of Stick Man, drew for me 🙂

I did some storyboarding for Stick Man that premieres on BBC 1 on Christmas day at 4:45pm. It looks amazing. Seriously. Check this trailer:

Ok, flip. Some other stuff. So, my bro had this whole social media dig with Telkom – he’d make something, they’d make something – it revolved around the talking baby TV ads from Telkom. I won’t lie, their dead eyes that don’t communicate what their mouths are are a bit unsettling. So, Nic Smal from Derick Watts & The Sunday Blues teamed up with my bro to bring you this. I filmed my mouth and comp’d it onto the baby:

Then, I did this little teaser for my bro’s new track:

My bro and I also made this video of this matric who was interviewed on Carte Blanche about Matric Rage. Yoh, he made me lol. The video went viral and quickly got 100k views (now sitting on 160+k views). I’ve stopped believing that view count is any indicator of a successful video but this still kind of makes me laugh. You can momentarily see the gears turning in this guys head after he’s asked a question. He recovered like a champion. Greatness:

Then I drew this pic for a colleague Ruan, who was dressed like this for his bachelor party:

Look. Here’s some pics of Onion Boy! I hope we can still make an Onion Boy short or something. I dig Onion Boy and think he’s super endearing:

Guys. I gotta say. Bru & Boegie got into Story Lab. So, I get a trip to Disney. I started writing this post before I knew, and now I know, so. That’s amazing. Here are the others in the series pool:

So. If you’ve been following my work for an amount of time, you may know how close Bru & Boegie are to my heart. Like – very close. I started drawing Bru & Boegie comics in 2002 in my dorm room at Rhodes, when I was going through some mal stuff, and I made a commitment to continue doing Bru & Boegie throughout my life to just have *some* body of work with a golden thread when other stuff seemed like it was falling down around me. So, 13 years later, Bru & Boegie seems like it may be getting a thumbs up from The Universe or something. We shall see how this unfolds.

Also of note is that Bru & Boegie got a little ‘short of the day’ feature on CartoonBrew.com. Cartoon Brew is arguably the biggest / most-frequented animation sites on the net so any time I get something on there is a moment to pause and go ‘thaz really nys’.

And, a Medical Chronicle cartoon about how expensive medical insurance is for doctors:

A pic I drew to kickstart something for ‘Mike’s Universe’:

Check – my dad has one of my pictures I drew when I was about 5 hanging on his wall in his office. I like it:

Also, here’s my friend Luciana. She went under a bridge in Kirstenbosch gardens and looked for tadpoles. Drew a pic of her in her sketchbook. She’s just moved to San Francisco. Had a rad time exploring and general chillin’ with her: