About RHP

Robin Hood has always been one of my favorite (semi) fictional heroes.  I first fell in love with him as a fox and later learned to love him as suave and debonair actor of the silver screen.  I love him in literature, and I absolutely love him in art. 

(However, I am on the fence with him being an ex-gladiator just come back from the Crusades, impersonating a knight and planting fields at night with stolen seed.)

So when I say that this project has been a long time in the making, I really mean it.  I came up with the idea of setting Robin Hood in the future way back (good grief, that’s actually true, now) in high school, but the characters have been with me for far longer.  I’ve worked at it off and on throughout the years, applying things I’ve learned, letting the characters and story mature and develop.  Lots of things have changed, some things haven’t. 

When I was in college, I was introduced to a really great book called “The Skillful Huntsman” by my good friend, Jenny, and a huge piece of this idea fell into place.  The Huntsman is a class project done at Art Center College of Design in California.  They took the Grimm’s fairy tale and did a whole semester’s worth of visual development for the story as if they were going to turn it into a game or a movie.  The book is full of the students’ character designs, settings, machines, everything you could think of that had a significant impact on the story.  Anyway, I looked through this book and the first thing I thought was: “I should do this for my Robin Hood Project”. 

After that, everything just started to feel right.  It was the visual development and production design that had always been my interest and focus anyway.  I love the bones behind a story – the pictures that no one ever sees but always have such a heavy impact on the final product.  And then I started thinking, what if I could share that background process with everyone?  All the snippets, all the edits, let my “audience” (such as it wasn’t) in on the whole creative process!  How would that work?  Could you present the information and the story in such a haphazard fashion and still have it make sense?

And so this site was born.

It still hasn’t hit me how much work this project could actually be – and hopefully for all of us, I’ll be too far along with the creative pieces of it by the time I realize the enormity of it to be able to turn back.  But in any case, this blog is dedicated to experimentation and adventure, and I really hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do.

Sara Silkwood