Following the White Deer: A Poem’s Passage from Image to Motion

The Evolution of Story, Graphic Novel & Animated Film 

White Deer: Rites of Passage began as a mythic poem that was downloaded from the æthers. At its center was a twelve-year-old girl aware of life changes coming her way, yet not ready to accept them. The poem unfolded as a rite of passage. I felt the emotion of transformation within these words. In this story, growing up became a fairy tale, rich with symbolic hallucinations. From poem, to graphic novel, to animated film; I was feeling my way through, confronting my fears, and allowing spirit to push me beyond my limitations.

To translate the poem into visual form, I created rough storyboards for a graphic novel. Page after page told the fantastical story of the girl’s resistance to adolescence, using sequential imagery. My background in film as a concept designer shaped this process: events formed scenes, scenes accumulated into chapters, chapters became acts. Panels and pages were equivalent to cuts in the editing room.

Character and environmental designs brought the story to life. Some places were earth bound as in the forest, other locations were ethereal and psychedelic. Visual strategies such as flat, middle, and deep space, along with perspective and color scripting enhanced the narrative meaning, adding to the emotional focus.

The transition to animation introduced chance and possibility. Using AI animation programs, I began animating panels of art and pages from the graphic novel. Most of the results were unusable, but sometimes they were striking. In some ways the unevenness mirrored the story; adolescence as an awkward, uncontrollable transformation. The process required patience and repetition, yielding occasional visual “gems.”

All these fragments were brought together in the film editing program of Final Cut Pro, where they were assembled into loose sequences. As this was an animation experiment, it became a constellation of moments connected through rhythm, and metaphor. Editing became an act of listening, allowing meaning to emerge through juxtaposition. You can see a snippet of the early editing at the top of the page.

(The next step in this process is to pull together an animation team, which is happening now. I intend to mentor and invite talented students here in Santa Fe to join. More on this later.)

I also began introducing musical elements from my early score, testing how sound and image interacted. (James Raymond will be producing the final musical score with me. More on this later.) Even in the stripped-down, experimental trailer, it was clear that something magical was emerging. The work revealed its potential, reflecting the same transformative process that had guided the project from poem to graphic novel to animated film. Just like alchemy, just like me.