Extended Practice: Thumb-nailing Initial Ideas

The story of my animation was something that I wanted to get nailed before I started thinking about characters, as I felt that the story would influence the characters more than the other way around, making this an important stepping stone between my ideas.

I started to thumbnail a rough narrative that I had first imagined when thinking about my ideas in the hopes that it would give me something to work from, develop and refine.

First draft

I managed to get to get to a point where I felt that the story should be coming to an end, but was struggling to find an appropriate ending that wasn't cliche or disappointing. So I decided to go back through the story and not force it, as I felt that it would eventually arrive to a natural ending.
However, I still didn't have any ideas, but it did make me begin to think about how the narrative I was developing was actually quite cliche in the sense that it was the typical hero story, and whilst I was fine with the story being cliche, I realised that it would have to executed really well in order for people to focus on something other than the cliche story. This has made me think about how I develop my story and whether or not I want to avoid the cliche hero story or focus on creating well executed animation and characters. It may be worth getting someone else involved with the script writing to help me develop the story, as this will help me to take an objective look at my own ideas and refine them.