Telling Tales: Building up the narrative

Lauren decided that she wanted to seek advice from Matt on which idea would be better to pursue and it was pointed out to her that our first idea with the characters being pushed and pulled may be a little harder to achieve but would still be achievable. Although we liked that idea, we decided against Road to Nowhere in the end, as we don't want to put too much pressure on ourselves for our first project.

With this decision made, I suggested that we completely avoid making the characters human, as I felt that Lauren's initial designs would be difficult to model in Maya and the parent character would be even harder, as it would be a more developed version of the child character. Lauren was happy to agree to the suggestion and we will focus on non-human characters when we come to design our characters.

Looking at our idea for Leap of Faith I wanted to establish a baseline narrative for us to start thinking about. Breaking our initial idea down into a beginning, middle and end we came up with this:

Beginning: Scene opens with the parent placing the child on the floor standing and slowly moving back before beckoning the child to come towards them.

Middle: The child makes many attempts to make it towards their parent. This section of the animation will be a montage, so the camera angles will change and the characters clothes may change to portray the passing of time. The child begins to become more stable towards the end of the montage.

End: The child finally manages to walk towards the parent and they celebrate the victory in some way (e.g. they hug).

Building a little further upon the narrative we also spoke briefly about possible environments this could be set in and we came up with either a garden or a living room. Depending on which style of character we decide to go with, the environment will match that style. For instance, if we chose to use robots (as this is a possibility we are going to explore) the environment would have a metallic style to it.