Story Decided

Since my last post, we all had to make little bullet points for different stories. My other members Karl and Ryan had come up with come really interesting stories. I was finding it hard to narrow down what story would be most interesting and appealing to the audience. I decided that we would swap sheets and put little initials of your name next to the story you like and see which were the most popular. We got it down to 5 different stories and had to work as a team to pick only one. Within a good hour or so, our story had finally been decided. One of Ryan's stories was chosen.

The story out line is:
Summer is sleeping in her tree house when a thunder storm strikes. Summer wakes up and starts to get frightened when she sees a big scary shadow slowly coming towards her. She moves to the corner of the tree house, trapped and alone. As the shadow gets closer to her, she hides her face and when she looks back up, the scary figure is right up to her. A sudden light appears and it is her pet Pandy playing a trick on her.

This story is really interesting as it has a different mood set compared to other animations and has a lot of different emotions to show within a short period of time. The lighting for this could be really interesting and would definitely set the mood.
The next step to do now, is for Ryan to start coming up with a story board whilst i start doing some more experiments onto the characters. Karl will need to look into the types of props we will need for a tree house.

Story

Since we now have the group in place and characters decided, we know need to set on a storyline. I have told the other members to make a list of several different stories which would work for a short animation. Once we all have a number of different stories, we will need to make a group decision on what story we think will work best, but also try to be a little original to other animations out. This is quite a mission as i feel that everything that could possible be done has already been created, so how do you think something original?

My short stories are as follows:

• Summer is tiding her drawings from her little desk, when she finds a spider underneath and starts to panic.
• Summer is drawing when her crayon breaks and it rolls through the tree house, underneath her desk of draws and she uses her toys to try and get it back.
• Summer has a flower pot and she starts to sneeze, so she starts to throw out the flowers from there pots, until get goes to throw out Pandy who was hiding in a pot.
  
• Summer is playing with her magic wand when she does a trick to make Pandy disappear.
• Summer and Pandy are in there own little band, summer xylophone, Pandy drums. Pandy starts to go crazy on the drums and his hand goes through, he lifts up his arm and is left confused.
• Summer and Pandy have cups with a string, but Pandy is not playing properly. Summer raises her voice, Pandy gets confused on where the sound is coming from. He finally picks up the cup when Summer shouts and he goes flying.
  
• Summer and Pandy are playing hide and seek but Pandy is cheating and keeps moving around.

All of the stories above are not the best, i must admite that i am not a story person. As the animation can only be just over a minute i am finding it difficult to try and come up with interesting stories. But with my other team members, i am confident that we shall find a story that can work, and possibly make some changes to make it a little more appealing to the audience.

Changes to be made!

Well i now have my group in place, i am going to be the team leader as we are still using the same idea as what i originally had but have been changing it to make it better.

The main thing which has been changed about the characters is Pandy. He was originally going to be a real panda who is always by Summers side, but we thought it was best if Pandy became a teddy bear. We thought about a few different options, for example we were thinking of having Pandy some what like Toy Story where when his owner is not around, he would come to life and you could see into Pandys character, but as that is too much like toy story it there fore is not really our own idea. We thought that Pandy could come to life at night time where Summer is not likely to be asleep, but again we did not really see the point in this either. So we have decided that Pandy is just a normal teddy bear, which Summer plays with and creates his own little personality.

The colour has been thought about a lot, and most of it shall stay the same, but we have no decided to change Summer's hair colour. This is mainly because our animation is now going to be at night, and if her hair is to remain dark, then you would not be able to notice her hair as it would blend in with the background. So she is now going to have Blonde hair, but i am thinking of playing around with a light orange, just to see how it would look on her.

We have now got a type of style in place. Its not final yet, but i very much liked the style of a video game called 'Fairy Tale fights' which is about childrens stories changed into gruesome ones to make more interesting for adults. This style is something which i have not seen before and could see this working for our short.

Summers Treehouse

Well my day did not start well, i was an hour late for class due to crazy road works which in the end i had to walk for half hour to get into class. I had missed the most important part of the lesson. I found out that my idea was not green lit with many others, and because i was late i was too late to find a group to work with. I had no idea what i was going to do, i was all alone and felt lost. I then found out that Ryan , Kyle, David, Hayley, Sam, Dean and a few others were in the same position as me, but most of them had already formed a group. With only Karl and Ryan left, we decided to form a group which i was happy about but i still had no idea where to go from there. As my idea was not chosen i thought i was not going to be able to do the whole idea all together. Karl and Ryan did not want to work on there ideas. So i thought do we need to start all over again? I had so many different questions in my head i did not know weather i was coming or going.

As lunch had pasted i had calmed down and we had a little meeting to try and see what we could do. The others told me that they had liked my idea and that they still wanted to work on it, but there would have to be changes. I was not really sure on how we could but we finally figured it out. Instead of having the little girl camping out in her garden and having to try and find her pet after he does missing. We decided to cut all that down and just have one location, which was the treehouse. The others thought it would be nice to have a short based around that. What to have as our storyline was a bit up in the air.
We set a task up for us to make a brain storm of as many different story's you could think of which could happen in the tree house, then when we need meet up we need to share our ideas, narrow it down and possibly combine two different ideas into one. The only thing about this now though is that we have to make a number of 30 second clips, which to me sounds really hard and rubbish.
Instead of the short being called Summers Playground, it has now changed to Summers Tree house.