Character and Narrative - Week 1 summary

To start the project off we started working on some story ideas based on the starting themes, we chose to focus on the 'a message' theme and started thinking of rituals as a message to higher powers or spirits and narrowed it down to native American rituals, summoning spirits. We were thinking of either doing paint on glass animation or doing CGI in Maya, we decided on Maya because for character animation it is easier to get across the characters emotions and feelings accurately with Maya. We used a whiteboard to get down ideas for the story and the characters, I've been reading books on story development and character design over the past week because i feel like this is my weakest area.

 I think the story and characters are the most important stage of the animation process because its fine to have strong technical skills but if the story is boring and the characters are unimaginative and uninteresting then there isn't really much point in the animation. If the analogy of a tree is used, the story and the characters are the roots and the technical skills and post production are the branches. Since i am working in a team i have had to adapt to working with another person and splitting the workload which i haven't needed to do that much so i thought it would be good to try it out since it's good practice for working in the industry. Once we decided on the characters we each assigned ourselves a character to design, i am designing the Shaman which is the spiritual member of the tribe who can contact the spirits. I made sure to start simply and design the character in terms of basic shapes and i kept in mind that i would be modelling the character in Maya.