“Dandelions” is an idea based on “Her Lion’s Jump” that I decided to develop since my friend and music composer Richie Kohan asked me whether I would continue to do more fantasy based stories. My first response was actually “no” since I’m not really interested in having more talking animals in my stories, but the characters in “Her Lion’s Jump” seem to really resonate with people, and all the works that influenced me during the pre-production of the film gave me a wealth of ideas and feelings about childhood feelings and dreams that I decided were worthy of development to say the least.
Now the approach I am taking to “Hockey, Love, & Guts” is very much character and script based, letting the art and the story and the script work simultaneously during development. So, for “Dandelions” I decided to take a purely visual development approach to the idea (even though I already wrote an extensive outline for turning it into a feature film or short series) and to explore it with watercolors. For one, I really miss the medium without ever fully delving myself into it, but having had some experience with acrylic paints and digital media I really wanted to learn more about watercolors because of all the paint media out there, it somehow resonates incredibly deeply with me. Either way, I’m also trying to take a more environment design approach before developing more characters for it, though my natural inclination is to really compose characters, and I already have a few more than the ones featured on the short.
