Start small we said…

The initial idea was to create a simple animated opening sequence for our first YouTube studio diary —our introductory episode— featuring a drone flight over our imagined castle HQ and its surroundings.

The inspiration for this idea came from two of my favourite YouTube creators: Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always feature incredibly beautiful, cinematic drone sequences and establishing shots of the stunning forest that surrounds where they both live in Northern Sweden. Given our love of the natural world and what inspires our work, I really wanted to have similar sequences in our videos.

However, as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite as picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment, I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to film without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma one day after watching their latest videos when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!

After a couple of days of thinking and sketching, I had planned out a ‘Tangled’ inspired single-turret castle with a small forest surrounding it and a nearby stream… start small we said.