Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Department
If you ever ask Joe how he does it, he just says to read Dan Harmon’s story wiki. A janky how-to guide that’s ended up on fandom.com. Full of broken links, made by the creator of Community and Rick and Morty. That easy ay! Well, all the essentials are there. Embarrassingly that mess of a wiki was the final key for me realising how we tell stories as humans is a shorthand for our entire lives. It’s harnessing the the [sic] cycle we all exist within. Not some crappy failsafe method created by American film. If I ever want to make something half as good as Joe, whether it be Dan the Man, The Meek or Bluey, I had to start being a student of story.
The power of story, and on putting yourself in the position for luck:
If I hadn’t tried to make the best grad film I possibly could, I wouldn’t have made it into that room at MIAF. If I hadn’t done my research, I wouldn’t have recognised Joe. If I hadn’t kept consistently maintaining that connection, and showing that I was serious about my career; I wouldn’t have been top of mind for him to offer me this role. I did get lucky, but I spent my entire career up until that point putting myself in the right position for that luck to occur. I will concede, I don’t think anyone was expecting that such a visionary storyteller would burst out of Brisbane in boardies and thongs. But though not a lot of people had been keeping an eye on him, I had. Nothing was an accident.