Starting there, how about your partnership with Johny Fraser-Allen who illustrated the book. He's like a Weta Workshop guy. Right? And that's who does all the effects, physical and digital.
These people are geeks. They know who Weta Workshop is. Yeah. Right. Do you?
No. It didn't quite work that way. I was at Weta Workshop, so Weta Workshop works similarly to Google in the sort of 20% notion. They really encourage their artists to pursue their own passions and their own projects, and they sort of facilitate that.
This is amazing. And that was me. I was that obnoxious person at Weta . I just being like this is incredible.
field crickets and Mole crickets and Jerusalem crickets. And then my friend Jessie sent me a Weta from New Zealand and then the 17-year cicadas emerged in Ohio. And I discovered the thrips and katydids, remembered the aphids on California roses, and the summer wasps drowning in water-filled jam jars.
"Lord of the Rings." They do all the "Lord of the Rings" stuff. You need a period-accurate crossbow, call up the Weta Workshop. So he was working there, and you guys were obviously spending time together because of "The Hobbit or what happened?
to me. John, as amazing as he is, he moved away. He moved to Seattle and ultimately to New Zealand. And he's doing amazing things at Weta Studios where he's doing animation design for King Kong and I, Robot and doing amazing things. And I had to ask myself that question again, "what is it that I really want?" And I had to reevaluate that. And at that time, my now wife and girlfriend, we were thinking about it and we were saying,
I was the luckiest first time author in the world to be surrounded by the incredible talent that I was when I was making it. And actually, I found him through working on "The Hobbit" also, because he worked at the Weta Workshop who create all of the creative-- they create the armor, they create a lot of the elements of the costume, and they do the concept design for all of Pete's movies.
I'm going to go be a writer. But man, like just going and being a writer is a lot harder than it might seem, so I showed the head of Weta Workshop, Richard Taylor, some of my children's storybooks and said is there any illustrators in this building who might be interested in partnering with me.