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Victoria’s One Man Studio

Local animator lands $100,000 TELUS grant and development deal with Corus

Animation is a complicated business, involving dozens – sometimes hundreds – of people, from the pre-production phase to the final touches of a background.

It would seem that no one ever told that to Victoria-based animator Denver Jackson.

Jackson, 30, has been working independently in animation since 2013. Since then he has released three animated shorts, signed a TV development deal with Corus Entertainment, won top awards at international Academy Award-qualifying festivals, and received a $100,000 grant from the TELUS Storyhive competition, all while animating almost entirely on his own. So, what’s his secret?

“I never went to animation school,” says Jackson. “I think it’s good because you don’t know how much work it’s really going to be if you don’t go to school for it. No one is going to tell you ‘Oh you’re going to do all this yourself? That’s impossible. Don’t do that.’”

Jackson’s first public foray in solo-animating came in 2013 when he began work on the fantasy action/romance Cloudrise. Tackling an entire 9-minute-long animated short on your own is no small task, with up to 24 individually drawn frames in a single second of film. Jackson says the key is breaking it down into pieces, making each individual stage much less intimidating than the whole.

“Every stage was a project,” says Jackson. “I didn’t think about the whole thing until the very last stage, putting it all together, because I think if you think about the whole thing then it’s going to get overwhelming.”

Cloudrise was quietly released online in 2015, almost one full year after completion. After posting the short on online video platform Vimeo, Jackson thought the animation had run its course. What followed was a crash course in viral popularity.

“It got Vimeo Staff Pick which was really cool,” says Jackson. “When I woke up in the morning I went on this one website that I would frequent for geeky news, and suddenly Cloudrise is there in an article.”

After being shared on blogs and social media accounts around the world, ending with a screening at San Diego Comic-Con, Jackson was inundated with queries from a variety of producers and agencies on what his next big project would be.

“At the time I was working on a live action film, and they were all confused,” Jackson says, laughing. “They were like ‘isn’t Cloudrise animation? Why are you doing live action?’ What I should have said was ‘I have an animated film script, it’ll be done soon.’ That’s what I should have said.”

Following the release of Cloudrise, Jackson primarily focused on freelance work with other studios, but after three years he found that his personal ambitions could only be held in check for so long. While traveling in Thailand to stave off the depression he felt at dedicating all his time to other people’s endeavors, Jackson realized he no longer wanted to work on projects that weren’t his own.

“I remember sitting on a ferry in Thailand, there was this ferry going to one of the islands, and I thought ‘I need to start making my own stuff,’” says Jackson. “I just pulled out my sketchbook on the ferry and started doing sketches for The Wishing Jar.”

Jackson headed home, with a brand new project fresh in his mind, and so began a production schedule that, while self-directed, would take up most – if not all – of Jackson’s waking hours.

“For the last four of five months I was getting maybe four hours of a sleep a night,” Jackson says. “I was waking up and starting to work. I’d make myself breakfast and coffee and then go to my computer and start to work. I wouldn’t each lunch, I’d only eat dinner, and then keep working until 4 am.”

Above: Official Trailer for The Wishing Jar

For the release of The Wishing Jar, Jackson decided to go a different route, and submitted the film to festivals around the world. It showed at events from Spain to Florida, including a win for Best Animated Short at both Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival, and San Diego Comic-Con. Jackson’s unbelievable work ethic paid off for him yet again.

On the festival circuit, composer Marc Junker, creator of the film’s soundtrack, joined Jackson. Junker and Jackson first met 10 years ago, and quickly bonded over a love of films and cartoons. What began as a friendship quickly developed into a professional partnership, with Junker having a hand in the scoring of all Jackson’s films to date.

“Denver has always had an incredible work ethic,” says Junker. “He’s always wanting to learn and expand, whether it be the technique [of his work,] or the message. I really don’t know anyone else like him. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s awesome.”

It would be another collaborator of Jackson’s, Vancouver-based writer Alain Williams, who would join Jackson on his next project. The science-fiction martial arts short S.O.S. was funded by a $10,000 grant from TELUS Storyhive, a competition, which sees audience-voted projects across Canada funded for production, and won the competition’s Grand Prize. Taking S.O.S. and creating a series pitch based around it, Jackson and Williams then entered a pitch competition at the Ontario International Animation Festival.

“The pitch [event] was 10 pitches, and it was closed doors so there was a jury… I thought you’d get to see the other 10 pitches but we didn’t get to see them,” says Jackson. “We understood how people did pitches, but we sort of went against the grain and did our own thing.”

Their “own thing” ended up working, with Jackson and Williams being picked from the two remaining finalists for a pitch development deal with Corus Entertainment, as well as Nelvana, producers of kid’s entertainment around the world.

“By the end of it we’ll have an animatic and script, but that doesn’t mean the show is made,” says Jackson. “But we’re getting paid to do what we love. It’s cool.”

Jackson is already on to his next project, and his most ambitious yet. After entering a pitch Storyhive competition open only to previous winners, Jackson was awarded a $100,000 grant. With that grant, Jackson has begun producing a 40-minute animated short as part of larger feature script planned for later on. Thanks to positive buzz on past projects, he might not be so alone for this one.

“A lot of people are interested in volunteering,” he says. “I’ve got an Executive Producer, and a lot of the funding is going to voice actors, music… there’s a budget for background artists and that’s about it.”

So it’s on to the next project, and after that, the next. Jackson never slows down, and by all accounts has no intention of ever doing so. While the hours alone might push other people away, Jackson isn’t entirely sure how even he can keep it up. He does, however, have an idea.

“I know that I haven’t felt depressed since working on The Wishing Jar and making my own projects,” he says. “There hasn’t been a single day that I’ve felt sad. For some reason, doing your own thing, you feel so fulfilled and accomplished. Like you’ve done something. The films I work on, it’s a part of who I am. I’m just being myself in that space.”

As a creator, Jackson knows that things vary between individuals. A lack of “inspiration” does not mean a lack of talent, and he says that working through those periods is key.

“You have to sit down and keep working. It can be really tough. Some creatives get that spark of inspiration and then they just keep working,” he says. “That happens rarely. I just have to sit down and keep working on it. When that spark does happen it’s just the icing on the cake, but it isn’t something I work towards. When it happens it happens and it’s like ‘Oh that feels good,’ but then you just keep working.”

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There’s some great stuff in here about the straight male roots of D&D, and the company’s - and cultures - shift towards a wider audience.

When I first started getting into RPGs with was with the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and it was the art that grabbed me. But now, looking back, it was obvious it was made with people like me in mind. The men were the ass-kicking heroes, with the women in the supporting roles of Rogue or Wizard. Also, everyone was white (or non-human).

5th Edition is taking a real step towards depicting their cultures, their characters, and even their monsters in a way that reflects the diversity and nuance of life.

I couldn’t be more thrilled.

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If I haven’t already mentioned it, Friends at the Table is a spectacular Actual Play podcast lead by game journalist and Waypoint’s Editor-in-Chief Austin Walker. They’re just on the cusp of beginning their third season, so now is as good a time as any to get started.

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A great story from Waypoint about podcaster/gamer/writer Alex Roberts’ experience at the New World Magischola LARP in the United States.

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Pretty cool write-up about how the most narratively minded people around can either be the worst GMs, or the best. Games are about collaboratively telling a story, and if you can give up some of that control to the players, well then you might be hurting yourself and your players.

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How Roleplaying Games Changed the Way I Experience Stories

I started playing roleplaying games in high school, and from that moment on no story would ever look the same.

Before games, stories were a recounting of events, something static and unavoidable, there to be observed. Whether it was a novel, a movie, or a TV show, it always seemed to me that the characters would make their decisions no matter what – it was just what happened. They were still entertaining, of course, but there didn’t seem to be any choice in the matter; Harry Potter isn’t going to find the Philosopher’s Stone with his wits, bravery, and the support of his friends; he’s going to find it because he was always going to find it. Every character in a story was a fish, being inexorably reeled along a line towards whatever destiny awaited them on the other side.

Then I found roleplaying games. I took control a character in a story – in this case, a mutant named Spectre in a homebrewed X-Men game – and all of sudden I was the one making those decisions. The story didn’t move because it had to, it moved because I wanted it to. Do I want to negotiate with this person, or blackmail them? Is this a fight we can avoid, or should we press the advantage we have? By thinking like the character, the events of the story weren’t just narrative, they were something my friends and I were living. They were real events that we had agency over, just like we did in our everyday lives.

From that point on, that’s what stories became. They were people living their lives. I’d lived the life of a character, in my own way, and now I felt I knew what they were feeling, thinking. It might seem like I’m finding a mountain where there’s a molehill, but once you look through the eyes of a character of your own creation, it becomes much, much easier to look through the eyes of someone else’s’ character.

All games are stories, and if you look at them the right way, all stories are games, too.

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If you don’t listen to The Adventure Zone you’re seriously missing out.

http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/adventure-zone

Just do it, please.

Day 80! Missed yesterday so I’m catching up, library by me, colors by @thekunfelmachine

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Great advice. When running/playing games I also go with “what would be the coolest?” Hasn’t steered me wrong so far.

D&D 5e: Changing Flavors

image credit: Risa Chantag

Some people do this all the time, but others aren’t aware that it’s totally admissible in D&D to change the theme or flavor of a class or race without changing the mechanics. Almost all DMs will allow this, and a lot of them encourage this. Even as a DM, you can create seemingly original NPCs that are really just reskinned core classes! Here are some examples that I came up with, but feel free to invent your own!

Keep reading

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imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

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Tina Hassannia also wrote a piece about how D&D makes her feel. I think a lot of players can relate.

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Here’s an interview from CBC of all places, talking with Tina Hassania about female empowerment in D&D.

I’ve always loved games the most for how they let us be who we want to be - sometimes an impossible ideal, or sometimes just our hopeful best - even if only for a little while. It makes me immeasurably happy that more and more people are being exposed to these games every day. They changed my life in a very real way. Hopefully they can change a few more.

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I... wh... huh.

Armor Up

With the recent rise of terror related attacks in Germany, particularly with knives, machetes and axes, German police are now issuing officers with chainmail. It’s kind of an odd mix of old world medieval armor with modern day tactical equipment. (GRH)

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“Shadowrun: The Game Everyone Loves to Love but Hates to Play.”

Shadowrun has always been about three things: cyberpunk, fantasy, and rolling hella dice. Thankfully, they’ve recently released a version that hopes to get you rolling slightly fewer dice and playing slightly more game.

Check it out here: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/

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Godsfall is basically a radio play about D&D. Do you need to know anything else?

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Yeah, they do Humble Bundles for RPGs now. There’s a looot of good stuff in here for a laughably low price-point.

I’m sure I’ve got fifteen bucks around here somewhere...

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I’ve mentioned it a couple times, but Roll20 is an insane, versatile, and extremely free online roleplaying platform. You can open it up through Google Hangouts, pull up maps, characters sheets (complete with automated rolling and calculations), use minis, and a bunch of other really cool features.