The Classical Elements: Generating Story Ideas

Before moving on to character design I feel that it is a good idea to come up with my story first, as it will reduce the amount of designing I have to do, as I can focus purely on the element I have chosen. At first I really struggled to come up with an suitable idea, they were all either too ambitious or no where near ambitious enough. It was frustrating. However, after sticking to it for a VERY LONG TIME, I did manage to come up with a few ideas that I felt had potential and then the tricky part came along of picking one and sticking to it.

After a lot of thinking (and a lot of tea) I finally managed to find an idea that I felt had plenty of potential and could possibly be developed upon if the story ended up being too short. So I decided to go for the base element of Water, linking it to the idea that water gives life and is a source of life to practically all living things. From here I wanted to introduce earth to represent Mother Nature, again as this is linked to life and creation, I thought it fit nicely. My idea is that these two elements come together to create a new life, my line of thinking here went to a little mud character (water + earth = mud. Right?). Now, at this point I wasn't really thinking about the time restriction, so I went off on a bit of tangent and began to think of how I could then carry the story on with this character. However, I did realise in the end and added those thoughts as possible developments.

Now that I have a basic idea I can begin the initial storyboards and animatics.