Gav Barbey (Part two)

This time we talk to Gav Barbey, about the release of his new book,  Little Seed America and accompanying music album Trees of North America.

You must be excited. Tell us about the songs on the album. Who wrote them, how did they come about?
The end of the book has a map showing where the trees originally come from, what states they are native to. There are also a few fun and interesting facts about the tree, ones I love. Mark Giblin, whom I have been creating Sunnytime Productions with is a musician; he wrote the six songs for the back of the book and then we made little video clips that play when you tap on the tree icon. We loved them so much Mark just steamrolled out another eight songs for other North American Trees, and these have become the animated album ‘Trees of North America’.

They are a great way for us to expand as we introduced native animals, birds, reptiles, insects and educational word text to these beautiful songs.

The eBook now has the animated pages, an activity tree map and song page, an activity animal page with short animations and the animals unique sound, an at home activity suggestion page, and then there is the animated album … it is really exciting! On my American book reading I gave away copies of the paperback at every reading in the hope of inspiring children and adults to go out there and hug a tree, to plant a tree and to sing, draw and learn with their children.

A friend of mine is training as a teacher and she recently completed an assignment using ‘Little Seed’ – “it’s a gorgeous book” was her comment. Did you think about how it might be used by parents and teachers when you first wrote it?
The only thing I knew was that I wanted it to be educational. Many of Eric Carle’s picture books are educational, and I love that. They have extras and, as a parent, I would fall in love with certain books just like my daughter would. We read them over and over and found ways to expand out the story. The map in the back of Little Seed was for me just that, a meandering off the main trail, an adventure. This is why I have always wanted to team up with an environmental society and a seed company, extend the story outside the parameters of the pages, just like my art, constantly in motion.

When the Sydney Opera House asked to perform the book with their Baby Proms program it made me realise that theatre was another way of expanding the paperback out into the wilderness. The Interactive Animated eBook is another wonderfully exciting way of wandering off the page.
To work with a producer and publisher within a bigger picture would be a collaboration I would definitely love to do. I crossed America towards the end of 2012, reading Little Seed America and doing art classes with children throughout schools, hospitals, libraries, and stores. Being able to read to children is really the whole idea of any book, and children bring a whole other dimension to a story.

With school children, I combine acting out, making sculptural pieces and building class trees and shadow sculptures. Now that’s living! I think if I could travel the world reading, creating and sitting with all those trees I would be a very happy man.

What have you learnt while researching all the different tree species around
the world?
How wonderfully diverse they all are, the small nuances that give each one its personality. I remember the first time I saw a giant magnolia flower, I took it to my studio and created a lithograph printing plate, The flower filled the studio with the most beautiful smell, it was late afternoon, I watched it close its giant petals and in the morning open back up and then spit its stamen over the studio floor. Hugging the giant baobab trees in Africa or feeling the cool trunk of the lemon scented gum tree upon the skin in summer. The thousands of seeds and the designs, the architecture of flowers.

The other morning when I was walking around the river I wondered if trees in the domestic setting got sad being so separated from each other, no longer part of a forest of their species. Then I realised they go through all the adversities we try hard to avoid – the wind, storms, drought, animals and birds attacking and eating them and so on. Yet every season they do exactly what they need to do to survive, and within this they give everything life. They are truly amazing … I often sit and listen to the unique sound each species makes as the wind blows their leaves into song.

Little Seed America is an Interactive Animated eBook
and 14 Animated North American Tree Songs

Little Seed America
Written by Gav Barbey & Justin Monjo
Original Art & Design by Gav Barbey
Original Music Composition & Animation by Mark Giblin
Directed by Gav Barbey & Mark Giblin
Produced by Sunnytime Productions & Urban Fox Studios

Gav Barbey

Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your environment.
I am an artist, a single father and dyslexic. Until three years ago my daughter and I lived in a huge warehouse on an old reclaimed rubbish tip in Sydney, Australia.
We built a world within, with paintings and sculpture, films and theatre, a bathtub and a cubby house and tented bedrooms. It was a place of luxury, and I mean this in the most affordable way – luxury when it comes to passion, wonderment, meditation and friends.

Today I wander between Melbourne and Sydney. I often feel like a travelling gypsy, determined to give my gifts to the world, to bring colour and poetry to the heart and draw a continuous line between everything.

And how did you become an artist?
I was 17 years old when I did my apprenticeship as a commercial artist.
I was taught craft, drafting and construction by artisans, reproductionists, illusionists and masters. It was about aesthetics and technique, precision, flamboyancy, extreme colour and movement and theatricality. I did my apprenticeship in one of the oldest commercial art houses in Melbourne, part of a thespian world that no longer exists.

When I studied at the [Australian] National Institute of Dramatic Art it was all about philosophical and intellectual meaning. I learnt to question everything, to influence and be influenced. As a professional designer, writer, director of theatre and film I learnt the art of free form, the art of abandonment.

When did you set up Sunnytime Productions? What is your vision for it?
Sunnytime Productions was set up in 2011, although we have been creating our hand-crafted animation for four years, honing and developing our style.
We originally started with creating a five-minute episode of an animation series called Sunnytime Zoom Zoom. It was to be a series based on vehicles and their relationship with the environment, designed for broadcast television.
We were in development for three years with broadcasters before the digital revolution came about.

Previously, broadcast content for pre-schoolers had been limited to the time slots made available by broadcasters. With the advance of the digital era and hand held devices, pre-school content is now one of the largest growth markets across hand held devices.

Our vision for Sunnytime is to be a dedicated pre-school animation company that creates unique, educational, fun, hand-painted and musical-based content across multiple platforms from animated series, eBooks, apps, games and magazine style learning worlds. Our vision like our heroes Jim Henson and Frank Oz is to enhance, enlighten and brighten the world of pre-schoolers, never just churn out computer generated noise.

1000 Pieces in New York (2009)

You seem to be collaborating with lots of different people as part of Sunnytime Productions – writers, musicians, animators etc. How does that change your creative process compared to your artistic endeavours e.g. your ice paintings?
I have spent a lifetime collaborating, from my training in theatre to my work in film and television. I have been extremely fortunate to have collaborated with some of the most sublime companies over the past 25 years.

I believe that everything is a collaboration, everything is an influence, from the beetle that flies through the wind, to the person that smiles on the street, collaboration is for me the key. My Iceworks are ultimately a culmination of all my disciplines, practices, most have had a degree of live performance; when I created 1000 pieces in New York I asked 1000 people to participate, to choose a small block of pigmented ice and place it on one of the 1000 pieces of hand rag paper then observe the transformation; I have based most of my inquiry over the past four years on the ideal that “The Viewer and Artist are one … as the viewer is artist and artist viewer, for without each other there is no Art”.

Tell us about the Little Seed project. You have two in the series published, but I believe you have several more in the work. How did the idea come about and how has it evolved? Which came first for the first Little Seed book – the paintings or the words?
Little Seed America is the second of a series of picture books I have written and illustrated. I wrote the original book for my daughter Bodhi for her first Christmas in 2004, after travelling to Borneo with Verna Simpson from the Humane Society International and the Australian actor Peter O’Brien. Being away from my daughter made me think about belonging, about what I was looking for and about family.

I wrote the original words on the inside front and back covers of my picture book hero Eric Carle’s The Grouchy Ladybug.  As a dyslexic, I write stream of consciousness, words pour out like a fountain, not always right and often made up.
I then painted the large format pages and poured out the text and there it sat in my studio for three years, amongst the countless paintings, books and sculptures I had made before Pan Macmillan published it.

Trees have been an important inspiration for me as an artist and they still amaze me everyday. The original idea was to create Little Seed books for around the world, a different variation on the story with indigenous trees and animals and birds from the country or area of that book. I had always wanted them to not only be beautiful stories and images but educational and environmental, to build like a encyclopaedia, a series that you could collect, to understand other places.

I have always wanted to align the books with an environmental society, a seed company and make them more than just picture books. I guess the digital world is helping turn what started as a humble enquiry into a greater dream. The next two books to be released will be Little Seed South America and Little Seed Asia; my dream is to have a graphic designer and an animator work with me for six months to complete six more in the series.

What did you enjoy doing as a child?
Everything, I was a rapid firefly, I had ants in my pants, I talked like a wild fire
and entertained. I was called Bubbles. I also wanted to go to space …
I still want to go to space. I daydreamed.

Next week in part two, our interview with Gav Barbey continues as he talks about the release of Little Seed America co-authored with Justin Monjo, and original music and animation by Mark Giblin.