It made me realise I could spend more time on the hand-drawing phase and go on adventures for inspiration. It was enough to simply share the drawings, paintings, and the music—and it was totally okay to 'just' do this for some of our projects.

This shift opened the door to sharing some of our bigger story ideas—the ones that would normally require at least a small team and far more resources than just me and my computer to create a fully animated film. Instead, I could illustrate and paint the storyboard, and we could share the score. I have to thank Jess from the bottom of my heart for sharing that video; it truly opened my eyes and changed my perspective.

This breakthrough tied directly into the work I had been doing over the summer to understand the source of my burnouts. I came to realise that one of my biggest triggers is a tendency to take on excessive workloads—a pattern that stems from a very old trauma wound.

The final piece of the puzzle was the idea that tied all of this together. The idea to explore a different version of the mythology about the song of a phoenix in each episode of the Vale of Araluen series. To use these different aspects to inspire and inform the story, art and music. It provides a unifying theme that allows us to explore, evolve and develop the characters, the music and the world.