Extended Practice: Initial Ideas

When I got told about extended practice before the summer, I had already decided that I wanted to use the opportunity to create an animation that showcases my skills as an animator and a storyteller. So I began to think about stories over the summer, and it wasn't until I sat down with my gran and we had a conversation about my heritage that I began to have any ideas that I could use.

During our conversation, my gran got onto the subject of ravens and what they meant in Celtic folklore and mythology, as we had been talking about my family origins and how the Celtic beliefs within my family unfortunately died out with my Grandparent's generation. We spoke about how ravens were once seen as creatures of protection and safe guarding rather than creatures of bad omens and trickery and this gave me the basis of a story to develop upon.

I developed a story around the idea that a character is taken into an alternative world by a raven, who has been awarded the protection of this world, however it is slowly dying due to other creatures inhabiting it. In order to continue to protect the world, the raven needs help of the main character to stop whatever it is that is happening and return the world to how it once was.

With this in mind, I decided to create a quick mind map of the key elements I wanted to get out of this story and how I wanted the characters to react and behave.

Ideas for characters and environments within story

This has helped me to put my ideas into a more structured perspective and I feel that I will be able to begin visually mapping out the story to gain an insight into where I want the story to go and how I want to develop this further.