I wrote Kania as part of the Film Fiji & Media Mentors Script Development Program last year. Initially, Kania was meant to be a film script, but my script writing mentor, Chris Corbett, suggested I turn it into an animated series, considering my illustration and animation background.
So the film idea was broken into a four-part series. At the end of the program, I had a full script for the pilot episode and a detailed outline for the rest of the series.
Being an illustrator, I began the process of storyboarding the script, but being a comic artist too, I thought that story and script would also work as a four-chapter graphic novel. So, I decided to illustrate the project, believing that the graphic novel would make a fine base for an animated film project later.
Around March last year, I found out about CAW, the Comic Art workshop, which was a biannual retreat where comic artists from around the world workshop their comic book/ graphic novel ideas with other comic creators and professionals from the comic book industry. I applied for a spot and was fortunate to be accepted.
I attended a two-week workshop and retreat at the Bundanon Art Museum in Illaro Australia. The book was very well received, and I got a lot of great feedback on it. The retreat was amazing. Being a comic creator in Fiji can be a very lonely task, and it was nice to be around people from the industry to talk shop and share ideas.
Currently I am thumbnailing Kania, which is kind of like a storyboard for comics and hope to have it completed by the end of 2026. I’ll then option to the publisher of my previous comic, which is an independent comic publisher in San Francisco called “Living the Line”, but I have had other publishers and contacts passed onto me as well, so I’ll see how that goes once the book is completed. Or perhaps when the first chapter is done.
Thanks to Film Fiji, Media Mentors and the funding support from the SPC / ACPEU Culture Grant, I was able to put together a proper script, not just in the story and narrative sense, but also something that followed the rules and guideline of film scripting. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn from industry professionals, and I can’t wait to get Kania out there for people to see.
Kania is a survival horror comic set in pre-colonial Fiji, where an English priest along with a group of Fijian warriors, set out to find a lost missionary party, as a virus that turns its victims into flesh eating zombies ravages the Fiji Islands.