Turning your heart into art

I’ve always been a dreamer.

I dreamed of being an astronaut and traveling to space, I dreamed of being a knight and fighting dragons, and I dreamed of creating my own animated short.

In 2022, I made that last dream come true. In the Fall of 2022 I participated in the X in a Box Story Xperiential 9 week course. During the course, Pixar’s story artists guided us through creating a story reel using Pixar’s story structure. This story reel is what came out of this course – It’s called Sprout and it was a labour of love! The story is inspired by my childhood and how out of place I always felt.

Creating this short was so cathartic. It brought up a lot of feelings of how lonely it felt growing up as a person of colour in a very tiny town in Canada. Not only did I feel out of place at school, but at home too. My parents didn’t really know the real me. I hid a lot of myself from them – because I knew I wouldn’t be accepted.

At school, I tried to blend in and not bring any attention to myself. I was ashamed of how different I looked and most people didn’t know anything about my home life – not even my closest friends.

As an adult, I’ve come to embrace almost all the things that make me different…still working on loving myself. I’m trying to listen to the advice I give to my son – weird is a side effect of awesome!

I hope you will enjoy this story reel as much as I enjoyed creating it. It’s my heart turned into art. My goal is to fully animate this reel into an animated short.