Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cassius Creed. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Cassius thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My name is Stephen Cassius Bolling, but I prefer to go by Cassius Creed Professionally. I am creating a 3-D animated action comedy show called Sally Mountainpeak. It focuses around the subject of boxing but with superpowers. The main character Sally Mountainpeak is voiced by Emma Breezy and features sixteen other professional voice actors. Sabrina Twyla who you’ve had as a guest here, is one of those sixteen, She is extremely talented and amazing to work with. I am using the Sony playstation creative engine call Dreams to bring this project to life. I am animating the pilot episode as we speak and hope to release it in February of 2024.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

As far back as I can remember I’ve always been drawing. Growing up I had various art mentors throughout school who introduced me to various mediums. Painting, fine arts, and comics to name a few. Animation is was what truly peaked my interest as a kid. Unfortunately I never had an appropriate mentor for the subject so I am completely self taught when it comes to that. My childhood consisted of watching a lot of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I was hooked on the magic of seeing all of these characters in different art styles come to life, to make me laugh and tell engaging stories. The moment I knew I wanted to pursue animation was when I attended Harlem school of the arts and saw classes being held on the subject. At the time I thought “Here’s my chance to finally figure out how this stuff works!” Unfortunately my Aunt didn’t see the value of learning animation and thought I’d end up as a starving artist. So I got stuck learning the piano. I was so frustrated that I didn’t have the ability to choose what I wanted to study. It was from that point on that I decided, whatever I wanted to do in life, I’d pursue it no matter what.

When I created Sally Mountainpeak I was in my junior year of high school. I came up with designs that looked far from what these characters look like now, but I was finding my own style at the time. I’t wasn’t until my second year of college where I started to develop my ideas into something that I felt truly proud of. I knew studying animation involved learning how to do story boards, So I took a class on creating indie comics. I owe a lot to my professor at the time Robin Enrico, without him, I don’t believe my drive to achieve my goals would be as strong without him. I didn’t get to make my first comic in his class and ended up getting a C. this wasn’t because I was cutting his class or didn’t’ do the work. I had worked everyday on it but I was too slow to meet the deadline. I wanted everything to be perfect. He saw how hard I worked and passed me but that wasn’t good enough for me. I had too much pride to accept a grade I knew I didn’t want. I annoyed the art director enough until they allowed me to re take a class I had already passed. They said it would be a waste of my time but I didn’t care. I had something to prove. When I came back to that class, I made 3 indie comics. Sally Mountainpeak, Sally Mountainpeak volume 2 and a horror comic called The Garlic vampire. I started selling them at indie conventions, bookstores and comic shops that would take them. For an indie creator at the time, I made a good profit. I continued to come back to his class and assist him in teaching his students. My work became an example of what you could achieve if you don’t let your ideas just be ok. Or in my case just a C. I would’ve stayed with Robin for as long as I could to help him out. But I need to leave college at some point. So it wasn’t realistic. Everything I had learned from Robin’s class, would later translate into the future development of my show.

When the pandemic hit, I was not in a good spot. I couldn’t attend cons, no one was going to bookstores and I couldn’t meet with Robin anymore to talk about art ideas or review comic panels. My social life took a big hit as well due to the mandatory distancing. My girlfriend at the time was stuck in the uk visiting her family and couldn’t fly back to new york to be with me for months at a time. It really tore a wedge between us and I haven’t heard back from her to this day. I had stayed in contact with my friends but some of them had dropped from my social circle not out of disinterest but due to how the pandemic affected their own lives. I felt like this global event robbed me just when my career was starting to peak. I was stuck in the house and couldn’t do anything. All of that changed until one day I was at home browsing the Playstation Store and I saw this creative platform called Dreams pop up. It was a software that allowed you to create games, art and animation all on the Playstation 4. Without a second thought, I downloaded Dreams and began going through all of the tutorials. I was insanely impressed with what could be done in dreams. You could literally create anything you wanted. I spent the entirety of the pandemic, mastering dreams. I felt confident enough to take my comics and translate them into dreams by creating several animations and video games. My work even got the attention of other creators. They asked me to help animate a pilot episode called “The Little Ninjas” After working on that project, I realized, I have all of the tools I need to create my own pilot episode of Sally Mountainpeak. I got to work writing the script, and animating scenes. I had planned to animate everything and then hire voice actors to dub over the animation. But when the developers of dreams announced that they’d be ending their live service and taking away the audio importer, I made a casting call to figure out what my cast would look like before that would happen. At this point in time i’ve found my voices, launched a successful kickstarter to fund episodes 1-3 and am currently animating the pilot episode. Going forward, i’ve learned from the pandemic that having an online store would’ve been ideal at the time so currently I’ve hired artists to create new sally merchandise that will release along side the pilot episode that will drop on Youtube in February 2024.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me there’s a lot and I mean A LOT of work that goes into the projects I take on. Whether it’s creating a video game, a comic or pilot. To me it’s never a matter of if it’ll come to fruition, but when. And a lot of that work going into it can be stressful but in a fun way of course! The most rewarding thing is seeing everything come together. The minute I can look at the project in full and have the ability to give it a rating based on the end result is what is doubly rewarding. Because now I know what to do and what not to do next time.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I really wish that I had known about Dreams during its beta testing. At the time, I downloaded it on launch day back in 2020 so the player base was MASSIVE back then. If I had known about it earlier, perhaps my following would’ve sky rocketed but on launch day, I was just figuring things out. So any quality content coming from me was going to take some time. But better to have found it, than to have not found it at all.

Contact Info:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CassiusCreed
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjkqG1yBKCjfFEFqVtdhcw

Image Credits
Full Voice Cast: Emma Breezy, Eden Solomon, Carrick Inabnett, Nathan Knight, Sabrina Twyla, Honey Nguyen, Jacob Shultz, Lauren Kong, Vivian Reed, Daniel Bauzon, Jingle Deleon, Joey sourlis, Jarvis Bailey, Tyanni Mah, Cassandra Dianne,