We recently connected with Christian Haynes and have shared our conversation below.

Christian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I first came up with the idea for “Zack In Time” back in 2014 when I was a film student at Biola University. At the time, I felt like I wasn’t really expressing myself creatively, so one day, a friend of mine suggested that I should work on my own side projects to feel fulfilled as a creative. The next day, I headed to the student store, bought a notebook and pen and began writing down ideas for what I would like to see as a movie or television series. Three ideas stood out the most: Middle School, Time-Travel and Secret Agents. I couldn’t really come up with an interesting enough idea for the individual topics, so I decided to mash them all together. After that, the ideas began to flood into my mind and I was just trying to keep up. Eventually, I had enough story material to write a script for a pilot episode. After completing that, I sent it to many of my friends for feedback and continued to do that until I felt satisfied with the final script. By that point, it was the end of my junior year and I wanted to bring the idea to life as my senior thesis project. I was able to assemble a small crew of animators, but it became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to produce an entire pilot episode, so I decided to make it into a trailer instead. By the end of the year, we were able to complete the project and I was satisfied, but I still wanted it to become a full length series. I put it on the shelf for a few years, but then after a while, I took it back off and reached out to my friend Paige Powell-Revis. I asked her if she would be interested in producing “Zack In Time” as a series and she said “yes!” Now we are in the middle of producing an official pilot episode with the hope of one day pitching it and getting it picked up as a series!

Christian, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up always loving animation ever since I was a child. I would watch the classic Disney movies and be drawing the characters with my crayons as they appeared on screen. I also loved reading comic books and comic strips in the newspaper and around the time I was in middle school, I started making my own comic books. As I got a little older, my parents bought me a video camera and I would always be making short films. My parents encouraged me to start a YouTube channel to share my videos and I did. My first couple of videos were pretty rough, but as I continued to make them, the better they got and eventually a handful of them went viral including my “Live Action Spongebob Squarepants Theme Song” video which has over 7 million views! Soon it came to the time when I had to start looking at colleges and I knew that I definitely wanted to go to film school. Most film schools only allowed juniors and seniors to take their film course, but Biola University allowed freshmen to take their film course, so that was on the top of my list! I applied, was accepted and immediately jumped into my film classes. They weren’t easy, but they gave me very valuable lessons about the craft of filmmaking. Around my junior year, I became a lot more interested in animation and wanted to pursue more classes centering around that. There was only one class at the time, but I still took advantage of it and learned a lot. After graduation, I have worked as a production assistant on commercials, infomercials, reality shows, music videos and short films as well as worked as a quality control operator for DVDS, Blu-rays, screeners and streaming services such as Disney+!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I first graduated from Biola, I was fully expecting to earn a full-time job in the film industry where I would have the opportunity to pitch “Zack In Time” with the hopes that it would get picked up as a series. That didn’t quite happen and I struggled for those first couple of years just to find any job that would allow me to support myself. It was very difficult to remain hopeful, but I still kept my dream alive of working full-time in the animation industry. That’s when I picked “Zack In Time” off the shelf and began to restructure it from a short film into a series. I would spend any free moment I had working on it and eventually came to point when I was ready to pursue it. I met up with Paige at an animation expo and brought up the idea to her. She immediately agreed to help work on it since we were both feeling like we weren’t in jobs where we were feeling creatively fulfilled. She was able to reach out to an artist named Luke Scribner via an animation mixer and we began to work on a pitch trailer for the original 11-minute pilot episode I had worked on. I had a couple of friends do the voices and edited the clips together myself. It was a little rough, but it gave off the idea of what we were trying to accomplish. Soon Luke was able to create designs for the characters and we were able to post them on social media to share them. Slowly, but surely we were able to onboard more and more artists, animators, designers and writers until we had a full production crew. Sometimes there would be struggles, especially when it came to everyone working remotely, but we eventually found our footing and now have an amazing crew who are fully committed to seeing Paige and I’s vision become a reality!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

What Paige and I hope for with “Zack In Time” is to inspire other creative people who have ambitious ideas to pursue them. We didn’t really have the opportunities to immediately go into the professions that we were passionate about right after college, so we wanted this project to be that for students who are transitioning from school into the workforce. Before going into production for “Zack In Time”, Paige founded her company “Imhapie LLC” as a way for us to recruit volunteers to work on the production including students who are currently in film school or people who may have just graduated and are looking for opportunities to expand their portfolio. It has been very beneficial for Paige and I since animation takes so long and it would be impossible for us to do it on our own. It has also been beneficial to our volunteers by helping them gain experience on an animated project that will help broaden their skills for when they are eventually hired into animation industry. Another goal we have is to bring more representation to independently animated projects and prove that we don’t need to be part of a big studio or have millions of dollars in order to make high quality content. It may take a little longer than usual, but it allows us to retain our creative freedom and make the show that we want to make. Lastly, we hope that we can create a show that gives a voice to people who are underrepresented in media specifically people of color. We are proud of that fact that the characters in “Zack In Time” are diverse and can represent every part of the audience!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.imhapie.com/
• Instagram: @christiandionhaynes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZackInTimeSeries
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-haynes-a102528b/
• Twitter: @christiandionh
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHWKIN-eBIj1-l0jf1pp53w

Image Credits
Luke Scribner Ashley Hladycz Rebecca Link Shea Beck