Creative Media Direction: Emotional Ties, Initial Ideas and Research

So we finally got our new briefs, this is one out of three. This brief is called 'Emotional Ties', it requires us to focus on character development through observation of life and on ways of communicating emotion and expression. 

'Relationships have provided fertile ground for artists and film makers for centuries. The relationships we have with our families and friends are fundamental to the development of our lives and our sense of worth. Neighbours, lovers, enemies, accomplices, opponents etc. all have an impact on our emotional responses. Each one is a different relationship. With this in mind, think about and explore the broad framework of emotional ties.'

There are five main elements to this brief that we must do, research, script, character development, storyboard and the final animation. And so I started with the research!...although I had no idea what to do or what to research. And so I finally came up with looking for stories that maybe I could animate, for some reason I searched for childrens tales, which then led to myths and legends and then ghost stories....

I loved the idea of having ghost stories and thought about  instead of just animating the story I could have some little children round a camp fire telling each other ghost stories or have someone telling some children ghost stories. Then I could animate them reacting to the story showing their emotions and expressions. Then I had the problem of finding a suitable story, most that I found were only suitable for adults, I couldn't really find one and so my tutor suggested that maybe I could look up creative writing and writing children's stories and make my own...

My research into this put me off, there was no way that I was going to be able to write my own story from scratch. So I have decided that I'm going to find a story that is maybe suitable for an adult and maybe change/edit it so it becomes suitable for children. I quite the idea of using a story of a myth or legend, as some of those sounded quite scary, especially for little children. 

From this research I'm already starting to picture/imagine what my animation may look like, it would have to be quite moody with the campfire, torches etc but also very simple and fun in design as it's going to be for children.

I am now off on a quest to find a story! ..