Old stories. New ideas. New ways of bringing them to life.

Lankytown began as a personal creative project and has been developed, revisited and expanded over many years.

Stories changed. Characters evolved. Drawings were redrawn. New ideas appeared and old ones found their way back.

Gradually, the strange little island grew into a much larger fictional world, with a history extending far beyond the events of its central saga.

Much of that history was never intended to become part of the main story.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t stories hiding within it.

Kyle and Carl have been friends for more than thirty years.

Both come from art and design backgrounds, and throughout their friendship Carl has watched Lankytown grow and change while Kyle continued developing it as his own long-term project.

More recently, Carl became interested in exploring emerging AI tools as a way of creating personal animation.

That led to a simple idea.

Why invent another world in which to experiment when there was already one waiting to be explored?

And so, for the first time, Lankytown became somewhere they could explore together.

Lankytown already has its own stories, characters and mythology.

The intention with Lore is not to rewrite them.

Instead, Kyle created A Brief History of Lankytown — a journey through the island’s past that could provide inspiration for entirely new short stories.

A forgotten inhabitant.

An unexplained event.

An old building.

A rumour.

A peculiar moment in the town’s history.

Any one of them might contain the beginnings of a tale.

The saga tells Lankytown’s story.
Lore explores the stories around it.

There is no fixed formula for discovering a new piece of Lore.

Sometimes it may begin with something found within Lankytown’s history.

Sometimes with a character.

Sometimes with an image.

Sometimes simply with the question:

What if…?

From there, an idea can become a story, a story can become images, and those images can begin to move.

Some ideas will develop.

Others will be abandoned.

And occasionally something unexpected may find its way into Lankytown that neither of its storytellers anticipated.

The Lore of Lankytown is also an experiment.

Emerging AI tools are opening new possibilities for independent creators to explore animation in ways that would previously have required far greater resources.

For two friends with backgrounds in art and design, Lore provides an opportunity to discover what those tools can do — alongside writing, drawing, design, editing, compositing, sound and other creative techniques.

The technology may be new.

The important things remain much older.

An idea.

A character.

A world.

And a story worth telling.

Bringing the island to life also means deciding what Lankytown actually looks like.

Its streets, buildings, coastline, piers and landmarks need to belong to the same place, even when they appear in completely different tales.

Maps, drawings, three-dimensional environments, character designs and visual experiments all help establish a Lankytown that can remain recognisable from one animation to another.

With every new location that is explored, another small part of the island becomes a little more real.

Every tale will find its own route towards becoming an animated film.

IDEA → STORY → DESIGN → STORYBOARD → ANIMATIC → ANIMATION → SOUND → FINISHED TALE

Along the way there will be experiments, mistakes, changes of direction and discoveries.

This site will follow that process.

Early ideas can sit alongside later versions. Development images can be compared with finished scenes. Experiments that worked — and perhaps a few that didn’t — can remain part of the story of how Lore was made.

Because sometimes the journey towards a finished story can become a story in itself.

The Lore of Lankytown is being created one story at a time.

There is no finished collection waiting behind the curtain.

The project is happening now.

As the stories are written, designed and animated, their progress will appear here — from the first idea to the final frame.

And when each journey is complete, there will be only one thing left to do.

Watch it.