PROJECTS

Blood, Sweat and Ink is part of the Wits Afromanga Honours Project offered at the Wits Digital Arts Department. The project requires students to develop a 15-page-long original Afromanga comic to be published in an annual compendium. 

​

I am part of the team involved in the project's existence outside its academic interests. Although we are able to make suggestions and review the project's curriculum, we are more interested in driving the project's presence within South Africa's comics industry. As such, we organize and run campaigns that raise funds for printed copies and tabling at events like Comic Con and Fak'ugesi. We also manage a website that catalogues all of the project's participants and their work so as to build a 'database' that talent scouts can refer to. Ultimately, our goal is to raise awareness of the Southern African presence within the comics industry at large, which spurs conversations around what it means to be an African storyteller in a largely westernized ecosystem

Responsibilities: project management, web design and development, marketing and design, project administrator. 

Project Porco is a non-profit, collaborative animation experiment in which animators of all levels and nationalities worked to re-animate a scene from the beloved Ghibli film, Porco Rosso.  

The project took place over roughly five months, in which 45 out of 46 clips were re-animated by various participants. The result was a stunning remediation of the original Ghibli scene - showcasing the skill, diversity, and comradery within the online and international animation community. 

​

The project aimed to build a positive community in which animators could learn from one another and share their skillsets, while also working towards a common goal. Having never seen something like this before (and feeling inspired by game jams), Eric Gardiner and I worked together to develop the project, manage its logistics, and build a safe and welcoming community of talented animators all over the world. 

​

Responsibilities: project management, project administration, 'rule-making', marketing and design, server administration. 

RUSH is a lighthearted sci-fi adventure comic set within an urban, time-travelling South Africa. The story follows Sebastian and Donnay - an unlikely pair brought together by a disastrous sequence of events.

This is an Afromanga I produced alongside Eric Gardiner for our Honours research project. The project aimed to not only explore comic and manga formats; but also solidify Afromanga as a viable visual storytelling medium for African contemporary creatives.

​

The first issue is featured in the Blood, Sweat and Ink compendium, which you can learn more about here!

​

Responsibilities: character design, character illustration, colouring and rendering, story writer, story editor, scriptwriter (view the full script here), and letterer.

Laura and her friends have the best after school hangout: her grandmother's International Half-Museum. Filled to the brim with half-trinkets and artefacts, the whole place oozes with adventure.

​

When Laura discovers that her grandmother has been kidnapped, she and her friends find themselves sucked into an epic tale of their own. With nothing but their wits and a trail of sticky notes, our band of heroes must traverse through one of history's greatest mysteries to find their own way home.  

The HMAS is a middle-grade children's novel that I both wrote and illustrated for my final Honours project. Overall, the whole project took three months to complete from early concepts, outlines and planning to a final 'dummy manuscript' formatted and typeset with Scribus. Although it's still very much a first draft, and in need of lots of revision, its near-30K words contribute to the longest piece of creative prose that I have ever written. 

The novel consists of 130 pages of original prose and a glossary; three fully rendered illustrations; two maps; two front covers; and various black and white diagrams - all fully formatted into a 6-inchx9-inch manuscript. You can have a look at the full manuscript here!

Project Abeona is a collaborative storytelling experience in which participants engaged with various digital and online media to 'explore' Proxima b, an Earth-like exoplanet. This media combined factual and speculative elements to create a fictitious world nourished by the project's participants. 

​

This all took place over two weeks on a private Facebook group curated specifically for the project. Here, members interacted with several 'missions' and 'announcements' that drove the story forward. Members had to work both as individuals and as a team by communicating through comments sections and posts, in order to resolve the presented challenges. These resolutions largely impacted the story's narrative direction - which followed a variety of story branches that I designed according to their engagement. Thus, participants had just as much a hand in the story's development as I did. 

​

Essentially, this project is something akin to an online Dungeons & Dragons campaign run entirely through Facebook. Ironically, Facebook 'values' the privacy of private group members, so I can only include an invite link for others to join the group and view the project's development as a group member. Alternatively, here is a downloadable PDF report of the project's development, which includes all the finer details behind designing the narrative as well as various screenshots from the group itself. 

​

Responsibilities: project management, project co-ordination, narrative design, group administration, story master.