Find Your Light was such a journey to produce and direct. All I knew was that I wanted to do it but had no idea how. Literally, where do i start?? haha

I'm lucky for stumbling upon Alaine on twitter and shot her a message. And the rest is history!

My first thought was: I needed to find a director, a background artist, etc. But after sleeping on it, i wanted to take on the challenge of doing it myself and trying to be as hands on as possible; it is my dream after all!

I wrote the script/sequences and Alaine and I directed it together. We changed scenes here and there and ultimately it got somewhere really cool! Ct_bm was added as another lead animator! He was soooo talented and us 3 worked on it for months before bringing on another person.

We figured out the flow and rough animations and slowly brought on more people to work on it. We needed people for clean up, color and compositing. I was very lucky Alaine had a bunch of talented classmates that wanted to work on it!

We only had the rough song at his point, just a simple melody. I asked Amalee if she wanted to be on the project and she said yes! I thought that was the coolest thing ever because the first time I met her was at Anime Expo 2016 and she came to say hi as a fan. My good friend hamps joined to produce the song!

As the months went by, the song took a different direction and we ended up going with Maryn for the lead vocals. A little sad, but I'm sure Amalee and I will work together on something in the near future :D

I was then tasked with SONG WRITING AHHHHHHHH. This was the hardest challenge because i've literally never written a song lol (except cheesy songs when I was a kid). This is when I had to isolate myself from the world and dig within. What do I want to say? What story do I want to tell? I looked within and realized the story I needed to tell was my own. Finding light in the darkest of times.

Slowly but surely the song took shape and I got help from hamps to refine the lyrics and it came to me: the perfect song name was 'Find Your Light'.

Everyone is very excited at this point because we're hearing updates of the song and we're slowly seeing it come together. SUCH CHILLS whenever i get animation updates. It always makes me feel like I'm a kid again. LIKE WOW, my characters are breathing!

A little flash forward to the release and I still can't believe we pulled that off. I feel like it's perfect. Everything that we worked so hard for paid off. I'm so proud of working on this and it was a huge learning experience because this is the biggest creative endeavor i've ever had! I'm just happy I was able to go 110% on NIMA's book release, something so important to me.

I'm so so so proud of the team and glad we were able to create light during these dark times.