Hello!
We are Thea and Graham and we created AYANE Studios to give ourselves a place where our imaginations have free rein and we can indulge in our love of music, design and fantasy; somewhere that we can create, explore and share the stories we write and the magical worlds they are set in.
Our projects weave together creative writing, music composition, illustration, animation, design, photography, and so much more.
Housed within our ‘Imaginarium’ each project has its own dedicated journal where you can follow our progress and adventures as we learn, grow and create. We will also be serialising each project on our YouTube channel.
We invite you to join us as we step into the fantasy worlds that live in our imaginations.
Thea and Graham ✨
tHEA
Hi my name is Thea Rose, I’m an artist, content creator and Alfie’s human.
After a career spanning nearly two decades as a design engineer in the automotive industry I followed my heart and shifted my focus towards music and art. I went on to study at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance where I discovered an affinity for composing cinematic orchestral music for dance and film.
A self confessed bookworm, it wasn’t long until I began composing music inspired by my favourite fairytales and fantasy novels. Over time these pieces continued to evolve until I eventually started writing fairytales of my own as source material.
Graham
Hi I’m Graham, I’m an engineer, data scientist and amateur pianist.
By day I work as a concept aerodynamicist in the automotive industry. By night and in my spare time I help with all things AYANE Studios.
Encouraged by Thea’s love of music and inspired by her compositions, I rediscovered my love of playing the piano and also began learning how to write music. We soon began composing together and as our pieces grew in complexity I started experimenting with virtual instruments, sample libraries and DAWs to improve the sound quality of our music production. Adding this technology to our scoring process has enabled us to be much more creative with our compositions and helped us to develop a more cinematic sound.
Backstory
For some time now we’ve been quietly creating art and composing music together in small fragments of free time. Over the years our studio has become our little sanctuary and a place where we can escape the real world. Somewhere we can just play and create for the sheer joy of it.
The inspiration for all our projects and pieces has always come from the natural world and more often than not has included references to folklore, fairytales and fantasy stories.
Whether it be a piece of fine jewellery or a piece of orchestral music we have always tried to tell a story with our work.
“Five years ago I burnt out due to the demands of my career as an aerodynamicist and I realised I needed to make some big decisions and changes in my life. During the year it took me to stick myself back together I read a book about happiness and how the path to it is often found through doing the things we loved to do as a child, before the pressures and expectations of society weigh down our shoulders.
So because music and art were most definitely those things for me, we decided to make more time for our creative endeavours and just do more of what makes us happy. As a result our ideas and projects grew and evolved hugely, expanding to include new threads and morphing into something much more interlinked and intricate. Eventually this led us to begin writing stories of our own as source material for our projects and this has quite literally opened up a whole new world of creativity to us…
As we explored this new world some really exciting new project ideas began to emerge from the pages of our notebooks and sketchbooks fuelled - I now realise - by a long forgotten childhood dream of being a Disney animator and a life long love of film scores. These projects are on a completely different scale to anything we’ve ever done before, and the desire to share them and other projects like them as we continue to grow as artists and creatives is what led us to found AYANE Studios and start our YouTube channel.”
— Thea
AYANE Studios is a small independent animation studio creating short fantasy films. It is a place where our imaginations have free rein and we can indulge in our love of music, art, design, nature and fantasy. Somewhere that we can create, explore and share the stories we write and the magical worlds they are set in.
We plan to share the whole process of creating our films with you here and our YouTube channel all the way from the initial concept ideas and art right the way through to the final cut and fully scored film.
We chose the name AYANE [ 彩音] for our studio because it means colour, design and sound in Japanese and we hope that in time, you’ll agree that this name suits us and what we do here nicely.
It has been slightly surreal to realise in recent months as we’ve really got into the thick of things that as crazy as it might sound, founding our own animation studio actually makes perfect sense as it allows us to weave together everything we love to do and all the seemingly unrelated things we’re interested in. It enables us to pursue our childhood dreams and also gives us the perfect excuse to learn and explore all the things we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. It seems so obvious now, but once it really wasn’t!