"The great thing for me about the Take 5 comics is that they let me practice my visual language technique without committing to a single style before final animation. It’s brand awareness, proof-of-concept, artistic range, storyboarding, and storytelling—all in one."
I’ve always believed in artistic experimentation and hybrid application. When I started 5Mind Media, I thought I’d go one way, but after considerable pondering and plotting, I switched course midstream. The wake-up call? Digital media itself. Exploring how best to present my work made me realize something: traditional cinematic storytelling is over.
Theatre ticket sales haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and while there are many reasons, one stands out—movies are too formulaic. No matter the genre, character arcs are laughably obvious, and scripts drip with clichés we’ve been fed for decades. The recent Snow White backlash focused on politics and casting; I didn’t need any of that. My issue? It’s the hundredth rendition of a story that’s been done to death. Even the original storytellers—if they were around today—would probably roll their eyes and grab the remote.
Original stories? Buried—beneath the latest rehash of whatever made the most money last quarter. But $500 million for a 90–120 minute movie competing with free three-hour podcasts on YouTube? That model is dying. The question is: what’s next? Short-form amateur clips on TikTok and X? Five-minute AI films?
It’s an exciting time to be in this field. Old models are collapsing, which means there’s never been a better moment to reinvent storytelling—making it sensorious, colorful, layered, implicit yet overtly challenging. We must stop clinging to the world we knew (which truly died in 2020) and embrace the new, multipolar reality. Cinema and art should reflect that.
This is where Take 5 fits in. By treating structure and space as equal partners to words, the series becomes more than static humor—it’s a test lab for new storytelling rhythms. Once a comic is laid out, animating it into a short film is fast, giving me a dynamic workflow I can apply to personal projects as well. The visual language I’m developing here is the same one I’m experimenting with in my broader work, refining it into a style that’s adaptable for whatever the “next” in storytelling becomes.
The process brings nostalgia—rooted in my childhood obsession with art books and Calvin and Hobbes. Bill Watterson contrasted “high art” with “low art,” and I’ve taken that contrast quite literally, building a visual language into a style of my own. It’s time-consuming, and my perfectionism doesn’t make it less so, but I enjoy the challenge.
💙 Chris
