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Johnny Whisper: A Story That Holds a Metaphor About What's Influencing Our Children
Hollywood Storyboard Artist, Writer & Director Publishes New Work
By Andrea Marvin
Writer and illustrator Dylan Coburn's latest book, Johnny Whisper, is described as a supernatural thriller, horror, and fantasy-type story that’s entertaining and thought-provoking. The story holds a relevant metaphor for present day about who and what influences our children.
Johnny Whisper is about a doll who influences a 13-year-old teenager negatively after he just lost his father. A demonic spirit that inhabits a doll, Johnny Whisper, becomes the boy’s only friend and fills a gaping hole in this teenager’s life.
The doll takes the character, Jason Blatty, on a dangerous journey and gives the teenage boy the worst possible advice. The story reveals how family and friends attempt to separate the doll from the teen.
Author Dylan Coburn describes Johnny Whisper as a wake-up call for parents about what messages are reaching our kids in the era of constant access to the internet and social media.
The concept for the story arose from Coburn’s own experience as a father and his paranoia and worry about who and what in societal culture was influencing his son.
An interview with author Dylan Coburn reveals how his dynamic career and intriguing perspectives have influenced his writing. And how there’s a common theme in his stories that addresses what you would do for the ones you love.
Dylan Coburn has over three decades of professional experience in the entertainment industry as a storyboard artist, writer, and director. He started his career in the mid-90s drawing for Disney TV animation.
Eventually, he created his own company, where he worked on projects for Disney, Marvel Animation, Warner Brothers, and many others.
He now works with directors and cinematographers in the business from around the world as a storyboard artist and, through a series of drawings and storyboard panels, helps movies come to life. His rich career background has influenced his writing style in his books and how he presents his stories.
Johnny Whisper is written in a screenplay format with no chapters, so readers gain the experience of creating their own movie in their own minds. Johnny Whisper is pocketbook-sized, and the pace moves quickly and crescendos, keeping readers' attention from the beginning to the end.
Readers experience what it’s like to read a screenplay from a professional screenplay writer, which is unique and different from reading a traditionally formatted novel.
Tell our readers about your professional background.
I can only do two things. I can draw and write, and that's pretty much it. I'm trained as a professional animator.
In the mid-90s, I trained in animation when we were drawing on paper – on Donald Duck cartoons, and that's how I got into the business.
From there, I continued in animation and created my own company. We did many projects for DC Comics, Marvel Animation, and morning TV.
I started writing in 2005. My early career was all drawing and animation. For the most part, how I make money is drawing, and where I exercise my compulsion to imagine things and to bring ideas to fruition from nothing is writing.
I was drawing away in animation until about 2015. I was spending a lot of time in LA. I love that place, and I've always gone there for work. Everyone speaks the language of artists which I very much enjoy.
Around that time, I started doing storyboards for live-action, left the company I created, and struck out on my own as a gun for hire as a storyboard artist. It has been incredible.
For the last 10 years, I've been working primarily with productions all over the world and have worked alongside directors to help bring screenplays to the screen. It’s pretty much like making a comic book of the movie before it gets shot.
Briefly explain a storyboard - how would you describe that process in filmmaking?
Creating a storyboard is planning the movie out as a series of still images before the camera rolls. If a writer has a blank page, the storyboard artist has a blank movie.
Screenplays are a fantastic way to tell a story - punchy, quick, and to the point, and a screenplay can be interpreted in infinitely different ways. That’s where the director and storyboard artist come in - to design what will be on the screen at any one time.
With a good screenplay, the movie is not there, but the story is – if it's engaging and a fantastic read, the reader naturally makes their own movie as they read using their imagination. That’s exactly what I do every day.
My job is to help the director find their movies, and I do that through a series of drawings, which we call storyboard panels. They pretty much describe every shot through drawings and images. We can communicate them to the entire crew, who then know exactly what movie we’re all attempting to make.
The storyboard is an incredible tool to get everyone on the same page and for the director to explain visually what they're trying to do. It's invaluable, especially with movies that are complex and require a lot of departments to sync up and work together.
You describe yourself as an illustrator first. Did your illustrations inspire you to start writing, or how did that happen for you?
I think life inspired me to start writing. Writing has become a need - ideas emerge and they need to be put to paper. Writing seems to crystallize ideas to their essence.
Earlier in my career I’d have a thought for a character or situation and my first instinct would be to draw, but these days I see the process of drawing as working in the fantasy realm. That is, being creative with existing elements.
William Blake's idea that imagination is the ultimate creative act - bringing something to life from within yourself and yourself alone, is what writing is very much for me. It’s bigger and more powerful than mere fantasy, it’s what you can uniquely gift to the world from within.
Much of the advice for modern writers is to show, not tell, which is exactly what I do every day with screenwriting. It's such a great way of expressing the story to the reader to quickly consume, but the format is not commonly available to the public.
Much prose writing feels so slow to me because everything is overly-explained, and I don’t get the story fast enough. Since I already write and think like a screenwriter, I decided to format my books as screenplays. Readers can create movies in their minds written by a screenwriter who knows how to write movies— and they get to make their very own movie as they read.
Did your background in film and screenwriting influence your latest book, Johnny Whisper?
Absolutely, and I follow the golden rule - entertainment first. I want to take my readers on a wild ride - just like a great movie does.
When I wrote Johnny Whisper, it started as a short film and story and expanded into a feature. Unlike novels, screenplays are acutely aware of time. The narrative can not be boring, and can not stop the story for any kind of side quest.
I pledge to never waste my readers time - everything happens for a reason and everything pays off.
M3gan was very inspiring to me. It was not only about the child's sick and twisted relationship with a doll, which is essentially what Johnny Whisper is about. But it also has a message that is relevant to the present day.
We can watch M3gan, and it gives us something to think about as far as what technology, robots, and AI can do to our children.
With Johnny Whisper, it's a different angle and comes from a different place. Instead of technology influencing our children, it's about how anything influences them.
Johnny Whisper is a doll who, like the M3gan character, influences a teenager negatively. The teenage boy has just lost his father and has this giant gaping hole in his life.
The core conflict begins when that hole is filled by befriending a demonic spirit that inhabits the doll, Johnny Whisper. This results in a wild and dangerous journey because it turns out that demonic spirits can give extremely bad advice to anybody who will listen.
That leads to who else I wrote the book for - parents. It's a wake-up call about who's influencing your kids. Online, it’s just crazy; all these invisible forces that are influencing our children. How do we know who they are or what they’re telling them?
Johnny Whisper is my metaphor for that. It's who fills our children's minds when they need something from our culture.
Our modern culture can be very materialistic, and light on meaning, and as they should, teenagers ultimately look for meaning in their lives; if we don’t provide it, somebody - or something else will.
Why did you choose that message? The rapid advancement of technology and AI?
The concept arose from being paranoid from my own experience as a father. My son is now 13, so he’s the same age as Jason, the character in my book. I’ve always been paranoid about who and what influences my son, which is how I think this story was born.
Sure, AI is a concern: Bots; Bullies; Trolls; Liars; Groomers; Porn… there’s a lot to be concerned about! I remember my mom told me that my grandmother was always worried about the children, and that's me. I'm my grandmother, and I'm always worried about the children.
Why did you choose to tell the story through an ancient doll?
I love creepy doll stories. And I wanted to say something big. I mean, some pretty horrible things happen in this story. Things that cut close to the bone.
I think the idea of a teenager with no friends except for a creepy little doll from the 16th century is cute way to package a story that carries very serious themes. So, it’s a metaphor intended for maximum entertainment instead of coming at people with preachy ideas.
I feel like you can tell when a movie tries to sell you something and get you behind an idea.
How would you describe the layout of the book? Short chapters?
It's unique because it gives consumers the experience you get as a professional when reading a screenplay. You open the book, and there are a couple of little bits and pieces of title credit, and then it's straight-up screenplay - no chapters from the story's start to the end. I don't see the need for chapters.
I want people to be able to pick it up and read it, maybe while they’re on a train for an hour a day during their commute. It's written in a way where the whole thing flows and constantly builds tension. I want readers to be in the story from the beginning and be pushed higher and higher in intensity until the end.
It's not a book where you pick it up and put it down. You want to pick it up and get it read in one big hit.
I really hate reading the left-hand pages of a novel because you can't fold it. So, my left-hand page is blank; I chose to put nothing on it. Now it’s foldable and easier to hold and read. It’s formatted just like a screenplay, except the font is a bit bigger and the page has a lot of white space so people can quickly move through the book.
The idea is that nothing stops the reader from blasting through the story from start to finish. It's in pocketbook form so readers can tuck it into their jacket pocket. After dinner one night, someone could sit down and read the entire book.
What upcoming projects are you working on?
I am working on a story about a super nerd who becomes a monster, kind of like the Incredible Hulk. It's hilarious but also a gigantic fantasy story. So unlike Johnny Whisper, which is more of a contained horror supernatural story, this one's a fantastic creature feature.
The other story I'm working on is a sci-fi about a man who wakes up after a devastating war, and he’s the only one left… or so it would seem. But there are a lot of machines. Hostile ones. It’s about six months away from getting a draft, so it's in progress.
How do you develop the concepts for your screenplays? Are they tied to life experiences?
All of my stories are love stories. It's about what you would do for the ones you love. The characters in my books are very different.
For example, with Johnny Whisper, the teenager’s family and friends who love him fight hard against powerful forces to save him.
In my other two books, Killer Bee is a military veteran, and she’s back from war, having seen the worst things you can see. She does have one thing she loves in her life, and that's her son.
Her son is taken, and people are not moving fast enough for her, so she takes it upon herself to get her son back. The story is really about parenthood, but it’s wrapped in a hard-hitting action tale.
The Punishing Knight is about the incredible value in old ideas. We can't just throw everything away every generation - we need to build on the foundations of our culture.
When we don’t think about what has been in our culture for the last 2,000 years and forge ahead following nothing but the latest trends, we can seriously lose our way. And when things go wrong, and your loved ones need you to take action, sometimes you need to look to the wisdom of past generations to know how to act in the moment.
That's what inspires me. It comes down to what you would do for the ones you love.
Anything else you would like to add?
When it comes to writing, we as writers should refuse to be distracted and look for ways to put aside things that stop us from writing. We need more original stories.
The publishing and film industries are like giant brick walls because the industries are constructs that have become entirely unfriendly to emerging writing talent. I encourage writers to stop thinking about what the industry wants and start thinking about what they can give to people directly.
I wrote Johnny Whisper for the public and not for the industry. I want moms down the street to go, wow, did you read that?
For writers, the process should become about the blank page and getting their work done. Anything that stops that, like industry-driven advice or trends, I encourage writers to block out the noise and keep moving forward.
Dylan Coburn feels that when people read, they create movies in their minds. Therefore, when writing, he constantly imagines what the readers’ films might be, and how he can make reading his books the best possible experience.
He describes his writing as modern screenplay format that moves fast with the least words possible to keep people’s attention. Coburn has been a storyboard artist for television and feature films, such as Percy Jackson & the Olympians and A Minecraft Movie.
Further, Coburn served as visual effects art director through post-production on the first season of Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
He has done work for Netflix, Disney, Paramount, NBC Universal, and Blumhouse. Dylan Coburn has received 26 international awards and 11 nominations for original short films that recognized his work.
Killer Bee and The Punishing Knight are his other published pocket screenplays. Readers can purchase Johnny Whisper on the Pocket Screenplays website.
For more information: www.pocketscreenplays.com/johnnywhisper
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