Ice Age - Manny's Past

Hey i know this is bad quality but all i could find on the net... what if we are using 2d in the story like where Manny in Ice Age, where we learn about his past..

nice?

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!

Purpose

When talking with Jared yesterday we were talking about why this castle is here, what are we trying to show.. originally we had this idea of a story/adventure unfolding where we have a character who's come onto this ruined island and ends up at the top with this magical tree.

So i've been thinking of how we can give our environment purpose and here's what came up;
- Showing the castle in its glory and showing it in ruins
- Bring a client in and make it a live project by collaborating with them, such as Rochester Cathedral/Castle. This would allow us to give this project an educational purpose or to create promotional product advertising the Castle/Cathedral.
Also the other being we'd maybe be able to get floor plans and just crack on with the modelling texturing, lighting, and animating. Rochester Cathedral is huge and perhaps more unique than the castle in my opinion.

- Narrative. What if we were to make this a stronger narrative as opposed to something we've thought up as a group? We should be enlightening people and teaching them something new which would be a great way to lead us around the environment.
Mentioning the educational purpose, Sam mentioned he was off to do a talk about animation to a class aged around 10 years old. Somehow we then thought what if we used this for our project, asking the children questions about our environement such as 'who lives here', 'what do you want to happen here', 'what is this place?' and getting their feedback either recording their voices and animating that over our environment. Also, Lizzie had the idea of handing out party plates to draw on so that we can take this research back to work from. Animating what they see in our environment.

Narrative can go on more and maybe we could take an existing famous character such as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and see how she would react with this environment. Maybe it's a virtual and interactive environment - inspired by Lizze's lecture this morning in contextual studies..

I don't want our team to scrap our existing idea. I'm just concerned about what purpose does our environment serve? What are we intending to achieve and how will it be received?

Finalizing the Concept

Audio

Hello team, it might be a bit early to start thinking about music, but I was playing Brutal Legend the other day and came across this song. I'm with Sam in that we shouldn't use music from games, but this one features songs from real bands so I think we're good. Check it out it's atmospheric:

Apparently they're a heavy metal band. Maybe they were having an off day.

If we might not be doing a season changed environment then to show the passing time, there's a really cool end scene in Gangs of New York which shows New York turning from baron burnt land to present day New York.

Just a thought

Photo's of Rochester Town/Castle/Cathedral