tales of khayaal
Animation & Digital Comic Series
creative Direction
brand development
social content
game design
A Gould Studio internal project, Tales of Khayaal is a digital comic series that gained the interest of a streaming platform as a potential animated series.
As the Creative Director for the project, I led a team of illustrators, developers, animators, writers and designers.
The project began as a video game prototype. I was developing game concepts and mechanics while directing the programming and 3d production. After a few months, it became clear we would need to greatly increase the number of programmers on the team in order to produce the type of game we wanted. We decided to focus on our current capabilities and pivoted to doing an online comic instead.
Having decided to focus on producing an online comic, we knew that it was unlikely to be self-sustaining any time soon. To help fund the project, we pitched the idea on a crowd funding platform which earned around AU$75,000. This allowed me to commission artists which I sourced by trawling through portfolio sites like Artstation and Behance.
I wanted each comic to be stylistically distinct from the rest, reflecting the different characters that each comic focused on. I worked with each artist from briefing through to final export, creating assets which I then turned into motion comics hosted on the website.
The crowd funding campaign received the attention of a streaming platform who reached out to us to develop a pitch for an animated series. This was an exciting prospect for us and even though there was no initial funding, the financial success of a previous project allowed me to spend the better part of 2022 developing scripts, directing comic artists, working with game developers and leading other creative works that could support the project.
Some of the higher tier rewards for the crowd funding campaign included things like custom art pieces and NFTs. I worked closely with the artists to make sure they were of high quality while aligning to my vision of the world and it’s characters.
