Telling Tales - Brainstorming

Our very first brief of the year was explained to us the other day and I was very apprehensive, but excited to get ready to start. I am a little bit nervous with this brief because I think that I will have a challenging time with the software we are required to use which is Maya. I am going to be determined and try my hardest to get through any challenges I face, however I know right from the beginning that this brief will not be an easy one.

The 'Telling Tales' brief requires us to pick a title choice and work in pairs to make a one minute animation that centres around the title narrative, as well as rigging, modelling and creative our very own character each. I am going to be working with Hayley, which I am excited about because she is exceptionally creative and has lots of great ideas! 

Between us we picked two title choices that we thought were most appealing to us. Though they are very similar titles when you compare them, 'Rivals' and 'Opposites Attract' I think will be great narratives, because to me they immediately connote action.

For Rivals, Hayley and I thought about perhaps including some competitiveness to enhance the action/drama in our little animation. We then thought about perhaps involving a family, or siblings for a bit of added theatrics. We mainly thought of links and associations when we were brainstorming so that we could come up with as many out side of the box ideas as we could.

For 'Opposites attract', we went a little bit more in depth in terms of characters. For example we went straight into the word 'opposites' and thought 'tall/small', 'up/down', 'real/artifical', etc. From this we started to imagine our characters and what we would like them to look like. 

At the moment we are thinking of doing puppets for our animation because they are very interesting to manipulate, and it is also ironic after researching the 'Uncanny Valley' theory and how audiences feel uncomfortable if the characters they are watching are too robotic/like puppets. It is also very important to us that the characters are not too visually complex, because we will be both animating them, and we would like to be ambitious but not overly complicated.