Adaption: Initial Ideas

Idea 1:

An abstract music video based on Ronald Jenkees' "Stay Crunchy"

This idea originated from a very old one from a post way back in the first year. After hearing this piece of music for the first time, my imagination wandered into a daydream and I found myself imagining all of these weird, colorful, psychedelic visuals.

0:00 - 0:13: A single spark of imagination lights up in the blackness of a never ending void and creates a single flower. Its leaves flourish as the spark reaches the tip of the blossom.

0:13 - 0:40: The spark ignites in a glorious explosion of colour, branching off like a great tree into the void, creating stunning landscapes and sparking life into plants, trees and forming enormous mountains which stand tall and proud. The sky lights up in a bright shade of sapphire blue as clouds streak across the sky.

0:40 - 0:54: The camera switches to a view from orbit. The colourful spread of imagination slowly engulfs the surface like wildfire. After a while, the camera hurtles through the atmosphere back to the surface.

0:55 - 1:08: We drop down to a over-the-shoulder view of a branch of light as it hurtles over the landscape, spreading life and colour which zooms past the camera.

1:09-1:24: We switch to another camera which slowly pans over the now finished world, basking in its sheer beauty and glory.

1:25-2:15: The light suddenly hurtles upwards towards the sky, zipping through the atmosphere and out into space. We see the black void of space with nothing in it. We pan back to the colourful planet with darkness in the background. Everything but the planet seems completely lifeless... until...

2:16 - 2:58: The blackness suddenly EXPLODES with colour, spreading across space with a tie-dying effect. We see many, many beautiful patterns which also resemble galaxies and novas.

2:59 - 3:32: We switch to another over-shoulder view of the light. We can hear faint thunder as colourful dust swirls around it, briefly lighting up with the thunder as it creates the universe. spreading branches of light in its wake as cosmic clouds swirl around to form galaxies and planets

3:33 - 4:07: The camera slows down and pans away from the branch of light. We slowly move past the clouds of novas and other branches of light towards a lonely solar system. We cam past a star and down onto the planet Earth...

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Idea 2:

Designing, modelling and rigging a realistic, scientifically accurate depiction of a mermaid.

This came from a talk with Jackie on what ideas I could come up with for the project. Since my initial idea for a full-length trailer for my previous project's "Experiment 9" was scrapped, it was suggested that I take on something simpler and less extravagant, saving the trailer idea for the third year.

I told Jackie about my "Stay Crunchy" music video and she suggested searching for other, additional ideas that were more along the lines of what I wanted to end up doing professionally, so I looked at character design.

Since I wanted to be enthusiastic about this project even after my let-down with being unable to create a trailer, I looked to other things that I'd be interested in and how I could relate them to character design. Mythical creatures is a very prominent thing that I'm interested in, as well as creature design, so I looked to myths and legends.

During an evening in one of the computer rooms, I noticed one of the 3rd years' previous "Adaption" projects where the student designed her own take on the Kraken and how, in folklore, the Kraken is only usually shown as tentacles in the sea, never the whole creature. Taking advantage of this, she designed the creature as a sort of giant, submerged mermaid-esque looking creature with tentacle hair which penetrated the surface of the water; a truly unique take on the traditionally viciously depicted Kraken of ancient myth.

That's when it inspired me to look at mermaids and luckily enough, I stumbled upon a video about a similar creature religated to myth and legend posted on YouTube which was part of a playlist series of a programme called "Dragons World: A Fantasy Made Real" from the Discovery Channel. It takes on the question of 'what if?' and puts it in scenario which looks at how dragons may have realistically evolved if they were real. For this idea, I wanted to do the same with mermaids.

Part 1

Part 2