Blessed Be The Children There are many reasons why two years ago I started working on younger characters. The first reason was to open up a doorway to create scenes and stories with much less constraint, free from the often needless grey of adult thinking. Children are adorable in their own way, the simpler black and white thinking, a world where things are or aren't and people either do or don't, there is something quite magical about it really. The second was to allow me to tell a very different kind of story to anything I had ever contemplated, different stories, deeper stories but also stories that focus on how large scale events effect people at the bottom end of their impact. Quite often these themes are much darker in nature, if nothing else, just by the volition of how world events all but destroy lives and shatters the innocent hopes and dreams that once lived within them. Ironically, lurking at the heart of this horror is where the purest of magic also lies, the magic that excites me more than anything else, the chance to tell the stories within the stories, the stories about the small but unimaginable and almost unexplainable moments between people. Of course younger characters come with different rules and boundaries to their older counterparts, more consideration has to be put into scenes, how characters are dressed and posed, even how the camera is centered, but the extra labour is worth the reward. Because the reward is telling what for me is the greatest story of all. Telling the stories of when eternal bonds are made as family and the love contained within becomes about far more than just blood.