A children's series in which a dog learns who a place is. Twelve episodes, ages five to eight. Season One: the Queanbeyan River and the Canberra basin.
Every family that moves somewhere new watches the same thing happen. The boxes are still in the hallway and the dog is already outside, nose down, working the fence line, learning the place before he changes a single thing about it. That is where this series came from.
Loki arrives in a river valley convinced he can smell something enormous. Each episode he meets a part of the place: its rocks, its water, its animals, its people, its weather, its work. Each part tells him the same thing in a different way. The giant is real, it is everywhere, and it is not hiding. He just has to learn how to look.
This series is the work of the Living Places Institute, meeting children. Each season is a real place where the Institute is working.
The Story of Place process listens to Country and community, to water and stone, until the place's deeper character shows itself. As that work unfolds, two kinds of story come out of it side by side: an episode of this series for the children of that place, and adult films that bring the local community together to explore their region for themselves. The adult reading of this same basin is Who Is This Place: twelve organs, one body, every claim traced to a primary source. Each Loki episode grows from one of those twelve organs.
When the Institute moves to a new region, Loki moves too, and a new season begins. Every future place is a future season, each with its own companions, its own episodes, and its own giant for local children to design.
Each episode carries the colour of the organ it grows from, the same twelve colours as the adult reading of the basin.
Episode titles and running order are working drafts. Each episode grows from one of the twelve elements of the Story of Place process as the work on this basin unfolds.
Each season Loki is joined by local native companions. Season One has two, because the river carries him across the NSW and ACT border. It is also our family, drawn as animals, in the region we have just moved to and are learning nose-first ourselves.
Finished August 2026. Six minutes and ten seconds, in 4K. Drawn characters set into a photoreal rendering of the valley in winter: frost, mist and dawn light on the river the episode is about.
Loki follows the smell of something enormous to the white cliffs, and the gang-gang and the platypus help him read what he finds there. The cliffs are made of shells. The valley is a bowl. The giant has bones, and he has been standing on them the whole time. The episode is complete and is being released carefully, in the right order, once the care described below is in place.
To the custodians of this Country, this page carries an open invitation: we are reaching out for your guidance and collaboration, we would love the series to be shaped with you, and we would rather wait and get it right than hurry and get it wrong.
The living place has no face and no origin story because those are not ours to invent. The drawn characters are hand-authored, child-safety and privacy standards sit ahead of any audience contact, and no child will see an episode before all of that is in place.
