A kiwi, a moose, and thirty years of learning to tell stories differently

I’ve spent close to thirty years in post-production — editing, colour grading, mastering — mostly telling other people’s stories. Tama’s Travels is the first one that’s properly mine.

I’m a New Zealand filmmaker living in Norway. If you’ve ever moved somewhere completely unlike home, you’ll know the particular comedy of it — not the big culture-shock moments, but the small ones. Standing at a bus stop in the dark at 3 pm in December. Realising nobody’s going to explain the unspoken rules to you; you just have to watch and figure it out. That’s the show.

Tama is a kiwi from Aotearoa who arrives in Norway by wormhole (long story — it starts with a worm). Odd is a Norwegian moose who has seen a lot of things, and Tama is not the strangest, though it’s close. Tama assumes everyone shares his context. Odd has absorbed none of it. Neither of them explains anything to the other, or to you. That gap — and what the two of them do with it, mostly in silence — is where the comedy and the heart both live.

I voice Tama myself, in an accent I’ve made zero attempt to tone down. The show actually started from curiosity — I wanted to see what was possible with AI-generated video. But the story took over from there, the way stories do, and it’s been the point ever since. Everything else — writing, animation, editing, sound — I build myself too. I use AI tools to do it, but the technology is just how I’m getting the story made, the same way a camera or an edit suite would be. It happens to be getting more capable while I’m using it, and my own skills are growing right alongside it — so, fittingly, each episode is a little further along than the last, much like Tama himself is a little more at home in Norway with each one.

Episodes are timed to real moments — Matariki, the World Cup, the seasons actually changing outside my window — because the series isn’t set in a generic anywhere. It’s set in the actual, specific experience of being far from home and slowly building a second one. Where it touches on te reo Māori or tikanga, I work with cultural advisors to make sure it’s handled properly, not just decoratively.

Tama’s Travels is still small. It’s also, as far as I can tell, entirely mine — voice, story, and craft, from a worm that turned out to be a wormhole to a moose who’s stopped being surprised by much of anything.