Fly Away Home

Here’s a cleaned-up version with spelling and grammar corrections, while maintaining your original tone and style:

Fly Away Home is one of only two original animated shorts produced this year, both commissioned by Tamworth Regional Council—and coincidentally, both about Christmas. Where things get interesting is that only one of these two shorts ended up being used for its intended purpose: my other short, The Christmas Beetle. So, what happened?

Well, to put it simply, I wrote an animated short that perhaps pushed a little too hard against the edges of the supplied brief for a Christmas cartoon designed for projection. You can chalk it up to arrogance on my part. When making animations, it’s easy to forget that you don’t need to make something crude for it to be considered adult.

In the end, I think moving forward with The Christmas Beetle was the right call. It’s something I believe could be adapted into a book, and it manages to be mature without delving into the adult themes explored in Fly Away Home. Ultimately, the Council pulled the plug on Fly Away Home—and rightly so, in my opinion. But I made sure to finish the film and release it on my own media channels once The Christmas Beetle was delivered.

Am I entirely happy with Fly Away Home? Not really. It feels rushed. There are plenty of animation shortcuts that are pretty obvious, and the script could definitely be tighter. That said, after a year of focusing almost exclusively on event photography and case study films, it did feel good to put out something a little more offbeat. It’s also given me the energy to dive back into finishing some other animated projects I’ve written over the past few years.