Our initial idea

Before thinking about what the purpose was to our environment, we had fizzled our first idea of a huge castle with lots of ground, to the concept matt has uploaded.

We had themed the island as a lady of the lake mood, so magical and a place of harmony feel.
We had our 2d character in the environment who has come onto this island by boat, docked up and looked up to see an odd glow coming from inside the castle ruins, glowing easily seen because it is in the night time. The character walks through my dock room area, walks round and up some stairs corridor which will have some cool lighting effects going on as we hear these orbs which we cannot see yet. The character has to creep and crawl through broken rubble where the ruin has caved off areas, to get into this final room. Character shot over their face of the glow from the orbs in this tree. This final room holds the biggest tree EVER (was living but now the team are thinking to model a dead tree as its not as difficult to model) and we finally see these orbs, which then takes us into a camera spin showing us around the castle.. and as we take a sweep through one of the arches these orbs come under the camera and we are left with the character looking out from the grounds in aura of whats just happened.

so.. that was the line we were going with, but that doesn't leave much animation in the environment. What if as we are going around the castle for some reason we see it in its glory, fading in and out between time of the ruins and when it was first built.

Throwing around ideas. help me out guys!