The Classical Elements: Planning

Like most of my other briefs, I started out by defining the words given in the brief, in this case the classical elements, and began brainstorming ideas that were generated from the descriptions. I started off with Earth.

Oh my days, it's actually been scanned in.

I couldn't really come up with many ideas for Earth. To me, Earth seemed more of a setting than a potential narrative. The only idea I got in terms of narrative would be to portray the planets in the solar system as each having a different personality. I thought the idea was okay, but it would mean spending a lot of time of creating 9 (or 8 if you don't consider pluto to be a planet) characters to represent each planet, and having to assign them with 9 different personalities. I also couldn't really think of a storyline, and because I was beginning to get ideas for other elements I just decided to move on, and potentially return to it.

Getting good at this scanning business

I then moved on to looking at Air/Wind. As you can see I was able to come up with a lot more ideas for this element, along with a few visuals. I really like the idea of portraying wind as a character - I also like the floaty, ghost-like sketch I have produced which I think would be nice to work with - and I think this has potential to be incorporated into a number of different story lines. For instance, my initial idea is to have the character be quite helpful, and help leaves fall to the floor, or have them pushing the blades of a turbine around to generate energy.

I really liked my wind idea, and I was beginning to generate some interesting images in my mind, but I didn't want to just roll with the first idea that I came into mind, so I began to briefly look at Fire. To begin with I wasn't really able to come up with any ideas, and didn't really see this element going anywhere, but then I started doodling flames and torches and came up with the idea of candles sitting on a birthday cake, but being unaware of what's going on and being caught up in their amazement of their new life and surroundings. Which left me feeling confused. I really liked both of the ideas, and didn't know which one to choose. I was getting really wound up about it so to take my mind of it, I decided to brain storm the final element, Water.

Which was potentially the worst thing I could have done in this situation.

Again, to begin with I didn't really see this going anywhere, but then I just had to go and remember that water has the ability to freeze and evaporate, throwing yet another idea into the equation. My idea for water was to have a character prepare a cup of tea, and fill the kettle and turn it on. I could then either have the water droplets try to escape the kettle, because it is the equivalent of torture for them, or just boil and be unhappy about it, resulting in the character enjoying a nice cuppa.

So here are my main/refined ideas:

I really don't know which one I am going to choose, because I think all of them have potential to be quite interesting animations, and there are elements of each idea that I really like. For instance, I like the character designs of both Fire and Wind, and I like the potential little screams I could give the water droplets when they are being boiled. I am going to have to explore further into character design for each of these ideas as well as come up with a quick initial storyboard. I can then see which one I think has the greatest potential, and which I can fit into a 20 second animation.