Premise; Tutorial Thoughts and Initial Ideas

I’ve now had an opportunity to speak to both Alan and Justin about my initial thoughts on the premise project.

With Alan, I talked about my feelings towards the course, and specialisation. I don’t yet have a strong sense of which area I’d like to focus my attention in, however, I mentioned that it would likely be weighted towards the technical/software-based roles, since I feel more comfortable expressing my creativity through software as opposed to pen and paper.

Alan was supportive of this, but warned that I don’t avoid continuing to work on and develop my traditional artistic skills, because many of the most technically oriented riggers and modellers in the industry are still accomplished artists, and this knowledge is often key to their work.

This is a fair point, and although my traditional art often leaves much to be desired, I still have enough faith in my potential to develop much further over the next year and a half provided I stick at it.

I also discussed my main two initial ideas with both Alan and Justin. The first is a return to my story project from last year, which was never quite completed. The unnamed story is about a genie, an evil sorcerer, and a little girl. The genie lives in a mysterious temple garden, hidden and guarded by dozens of deadly and almost impassable booby traps.

Here is some stills from last year’s unfinished animatic;

Alan and Justin both agreed that this idea could work for the Premise project. Justin suggested that the genie would be a good candidate to experiment with and show off some interesting technical abilities . It also has the advantage of having just two character models (the sorcerer was only intended to appear as a silhouette) and just one setting (the temple/genie’s garden).

There are a few drawbacks though; Alan pointed out that I might be pushing the length a bit, considering it might take more than a few minutes to cover the plot in its current form. However, he agreed that there are probably ways to fit it into a shorter format. Justin also warned to be carful of riding off too many past cliches.

The plot is already very reminiscent of Aladdin, and particularly the design of the genie is overshadowed by the extremely iconic Disney counterpart. Justin suggested that if I were to commit to this idea, I’d have to put lots of work into giving the style and characters a strong and unique identity compared to previous incarnations of the Aladdin story.

The final draw-back is a more personal one. I sort of consider this my fall-back idea. That’s not to say that I don’t like it; I like it a lot, and I’d probably enjoy making it. However, I’ve already spent a fair amount of time exploring the idea, and largely landed on it because I was prompted with the words ‘genie’ and ‘garden’. With much more creative freedom available us this time around, I feel it’s worth using that freedom to find something much more unique and personal, rather than something safe that was partly handed to me.

Hence, my second idea. This ‘idea’ is in a very vague stage at the moment, and it’s largely based on inspiration from a real-world place. It's temporarily dubbed 'The Bog-man'.

Here’s some of the pictures that inspired the idea;

Bogland Drainage Structure (Turn sound on);

These are my current two strongest candidate ideas for the premise project. Over the coming week, I think I’ll focus on creating some initial drawings for the second idea, to help project what it is I’m feeling, and to see if the idea holds any value.