Cafe Insomniac - from Moviestorm animation to novel

 

Cafe Insomniac - from animation to novel

A popular Moviestorm animation titled Café Insomniac has now been officially released as a novel that is available for download on Amazon, Kobo and the iBookstore. This is the brief story of its journey from Moviestorm animation to novel by its creator Mark Capell.

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Discovering Moviestorm

"I remember coming across Moviestorm just after I'd finished directing a TV series. I needed a fresh creative outlet and thought about making a live-action short film, but I didn't want to have to deal with the logistics.

Then I came across Moviestorm — animation software that didn't require traditional animation skills. I could just concentrate on making the most of my directing skills. I couldn't believe my luck.

The journey

I started with a couple of short films. After that, I started thinking of ideas for series. That's when I came up with the idea for Café Insomniac. I wasn't sure how it would develop, but I was enthralled by the mystery of the original premise — an insomniac gets lost in the space between dreams and reality.

In the spirt of experimentation, I didn't plan anything. I wanted to make the series as surreal as possible. No idea was too wild. And I was lucky to find some great voice actors among the Moviestorm community.

The response from people who watched it was overwhelming.

A couple of years on from the last episode of Café Insomniac, I wrote a novel, a thriller, that shot past The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to reach the top of the Amazon crime and thriller charts. I was committed to writing.

And after finishing a couple more books, I rooted around for my next idea. A little voice suggested that Café Insomniac wasn't finished, that I'd only touched on the surface of Justin's strange world. Café Insomniac became my next novel. 

Story development

Has Café Insomniac changed since those experimental days? Well, yes, quite a lot. The storyline is different. There are new characters. In some ways it is stranger than the original series but also makes more sense. If you read it, you'll see what I mean.

And in the novel, the story of Café Insomniac is told entirely from Justin's point of view. This allows the reader to get inside his mind, to feel his fear and confusion, as events unfold and become ever more strange.

Why Moviestorm?

But the guiding slogan from those Moviestorm days has remained the same: "I don't know what's real and what isn't. And which is most dangerous."

Without the Moviestorm version of Café Insomniac, I don't think I would have had the courage to attempt a full-length story with such an outlandish premise. It was thanks to the software and the positive reaction from the Moviestorm community that I could embark on writing the novel, thinking, hey, this might just work."

Cafe Insomniac is now available for download from Amazon, Kobo, and the iBookstore. There is a special promotion on Amazon for the first few days at 99p.

Further links

More about Mark Capell

Official website

Buy Cafe Insomniac

Other books by Mark Capell