Jamal goes anime!

Okay...so I have this idea in my head that in the final ten pages of the script when Jamal is climbing the beanstalk...it's going to be kind of hard to effectively film that with the limited technology I have access to. What I have decided is that I will turn that last part into an animation! I'm very excited about that...especially seeing as how I love cartoons. When the first episode is published it will begin as a regular book with one to two pages of color illustrations dispersed throughout. However, when it gets to the scene when Jamal sees the leaf sticking from out of the concrete...it becomes a graphic novel written like a comic book! This is a dope idea because it coincides with how the film will be shot. I have been working with an illustrator...Ronald Jones from AIU. He is a talented 2D artist and is doing my pre-production for me, which entails designing the characters, giving them different expressions, and eventually making a storyboard. I am also going to have him illustrate the graphic novel portion of the book. That way the cartoon images will be the same as the book images. He has come up with a few faces that I thought were cool. I narrowed a few down to what I liked, and then he focused on those with new expressions. He also redrew the body of Jamal and gave him some clothes. This is an awesome experience! P.S...I chose number 2 Enjoy the pics. Q. Kalique

Filming THE BEANSTALK: an introduction

We began filming for webisodes of THE BEANSTALK's first episode: Jamal and The Beanstalk this past weekend! Its been a long time coming. Many late nights spent typing away at the keyboard at a novel that was imagined over the course of two years. Mostly handwritten at first, it took another two years to type it...then another three manifesting the dream into reality.

I began by drawing pictures on my wall about it, then poems, later a screenplay for a children's production. Even reading classes; however, as of late curriculum has been developed, a website, the screenplay transformed and now...filming! I never even thought of this but once, and was reminded by a close friend that "Yo...we should film live action sequences of your book dude!"

A pause...and then..."yeaaa!" And the dream was born. Since that time...I have written lesson plans, tutored from the piece, administered assessments, and finished a screenplay all while making contact with a graphic artist to begin work on a graphic novel based on the screenplay.

In love with the movement of passionate things in my life I feel alive and blessed to be a part of something bigger. On the road to making this happen I began to realize that all the pieces to the puzzle are available to me, just putting them together is the challenge.

I came to Fayetteville to visit family and found that my cousin has been studying how to edit movies...and has become quite good at it! Not to mention, he has all the software to make this happen. That said, the first two scenes that were shot have already been edited and cued. I feel so blesed to have been able to be apart of this, and to enlist the help of family members and friends in future shootings!