For the longest time, I have been fascinated by the world of animation. As a little girl whenever anyone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say ’ a Mummy’, ‘a bird of prey trainer’ or 'an animator’.

Over the years my aspirations to become a bird of prey trainer faded away as the desire to create beautiful animations grew. So when it came to choosing what to study at uni there was only one option, animation!

I found an animation course which prided itself on stop motion and spent three years squirrelled away in a blacked out room painstakingly making my models move frame by frame. My third-year tutor taught me the most and was a big inspiration to me. He had been an animator on Pingu for many years! As a tutor, he was brutally honest if he didn’t like something and that was brilliant! It makes so much impact on learning if you have someone teaching you who really wants to push you to be the best you can be. I wish I had been taught like that from the start, but for one year it was great!

skip forward 8 years

I have been in London for 5 years now, working in the children’s television and licensing industry! It has been so awesome. I have had the opportunity to work on concept designs for many popular children’s television shows. It’s been so cool to create characters and design sets, then see them up on the small screens. I’ve designed logo’s for tv shows, style guides galore, packaging, products and toy design. Going into Hamleys and being able to buy toys you originally visualised is so rewarding.

However, as fun, as all this has been, and is, it isn’t what I want to be when I grow up.
… ’ you ARE a grown up!’ I hear you say. I know, I know! This is the shocking conclusion I recently came to, I’m all grown up… so it’s high time to get a wriggle on and start working on achieving my goal to have my very own animated children’s television show.

Here is my plan…
1.    Find enough moments to write down idea’s which are flying around brain.
2.    Turn ideas into coherent Pitch Bibles.
3.    Develop writing skills and rough out new and exciting scripts.
4.    Ask clever, creative friends to review work and be honest with feedback.
5.    Find connections! - Try and be brave and put concepts out there into the big wide world.
6.    Don’t get too discouraged.
7.    And lastly but not at all finally pray lots about it. Creativity and passions are a good thing given by our Heavenly Father! ( there isn’t enough space in this bullet to expand on this, defo will write another post on creativity and Christianity).

Sorry, I’m still learning how to write blog posts. My plan is to blog about each stage of this process of trying to get my pitches out there. I imagine there will be a lot learn a lot along the way, it will be great to share the journey on here for anyone who is interested!

Thanks for reading and I’ll let you know how it goes when I have more to add!
Here’s to being a grown up!

Hannah