Applied Animation: Initial Ideas Part 2

I'm really looking forward to this brief and I have a few ideas about what I want to do for my chosen book Mort. So after thinking very briefly about what the book is ultimately about I decided to go into more depth about what the book is actually about and I attempted to get a feel for the tone and mood of the book in order to kick start my ideas about how I was going to transform these words into a visual response. I must admit that my first attempt at this didn't go so well, as my mind was jumping all over the place and I was thinking of many different parts of the project all at the same time.

I know there's not much there.I told you it was a mess.

So I left this and did a bit more research before coming back to it and deciding to write out the plot summary of the book instead, as I thought this would help me to pick apart what the actual story line of the book was (and it worked). What I gained from doing this was that the book mainly focuses upon character development, but it follows two characters and shows us the changes they go through and how they develop along the way. There is also a sense of bonding between the characters and, as usual, there is a bit of a love story going on with one of the characters. This gave me something to think about in the back of my head in terms of how I was going to create the right atmosphere and tone to help imply that this is what the story is about.

This kick started my brain into actually working and I was able to produce a spider diagram of the thoughts I had swirling around my head.

At this point I had decided to go down the digital route for creating this animation, as I feel that it will allow me to create very surreal, vivid environments for my characters to be in, which I feel will be a really important aspect if I am going to portray the mood of this book successfully. So I focused on the things that I could achieve using digital animation and still can't decide whether or not I want any elements of 3D animation in there (it's a tricky one because it looks amazing, but is insanely difficult to do). I also thought about the camera angles that I might want to use throughout this title sequence and reminded myself to experiment with them because the right camera angle can make all the difference. I focused mainly on how I will create my story line and came up with a few ideas such as taking key events or actions from the first chapter of the book, or merging the general plot together to create an overview of the story and turn that into a title sequence, or just simply set the scene. Right this minute I'm more for the idea of taking key events or actions that happen within the book and using them as starting points to create my title sequence, as I feel that this would be a good way to introduce the story but not give it all away or risk it looking like a trailer rather than a title sequence. I also gave some consideration to my characters and who would be involved within my title sequence and I realised that it's only two main characters with the possibility of there being side characters or simply characters to create crowds or to help the scene(s) make sense. Lastly, I thought of sound and dialogue. There's a lot of speech within the first chapter of the book but simply because of how the second character is introduced. Thinking about this, I feel that all that dialogue is unnecessary and I don't know if I will actually need to worry too much about it. Sound on the other hand could be used to create a very powerful mood and atmosphere to this animation and it will benefit me greatly to think about how this is going to help me portray the tone of the book. 

I have a lot of work to do...