The Major Project - So Far

Tuesday was the first official tutorial meeting, where I was able to discuss with the tutors my ideas for the project.

Having spent the previous week doing a lot of brainstorming, I was able to go to the meeting with lots of ideas, although we ended up only discussed one of them. The rest didn't get much of a mention, but that didn't matter as I seem to have come up with something that we all liked the sound of.

The idea - The place where lost things go.
That's it in a nutshell!

I want the focus of this project to be on animation, so what I've come up with is the idea of a world in which all the lost things of the real world appear.

They will fall from the 'sky' of this made up world and float to the ground.

It is then the job of 'the finder of lost things' to identify who the lost item belongs to and return it back up through the 'sky'.

The story is going to come from the things that could fall from the sky.

Because the core idea has the potential to generate many scenarios / adventures, I would quite like to treat this as making an animated 'pilot' for a series rather than a one off animated short.

So, firstly the character, I almost had no idea what the character should be, and initially though of constructing a character out of free floating random lost items.
As one of my tutors pointed out, there is a saint called Saint Anthony, who when prayed to, returns things that are lost.
A Google search reveals him to be depicted as a monk. I must admit I was sceptical about casting a monk as the main character, but after a few sketches I came up with this...



...which makes me think it should work, and so I've already made some decisions about how the world works, having now discarded plenty of ideas which didn't seem to suit the monk character.

Working Concept -
Lost items fall out of the sky.
They have name tags.
He has a huge address book, with everyone's names.
He looks them up, and sends them back in a basket, lifted up by a candle powered flying lantern.

His way of returning lost items is kind of old fashioned, but then that's his character.

However that's not the story... This is the story... The day a kitten falls out of the sky!

For now that is where I am leaving it until I can better understand how the story is going to work... but I'm still coming up with more ideas.


A Flock of Pixels