Idea development

Although we will hopefully soon be at the stage of pulling the last pieces together of pre-production work, after a meeting today we have developed our idea further.


The basic story line is a boy's life shown from him being concieved to him concieving with his partner as he grows older in life. We based our story on a few quotes, the main one being "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page". Because of this quote, we wanted our animation to be inspiring, and have our character travel the world and lead a life that others would want to live up to. The animation is in the style of a scrap book, showing significant times in his life, as scrapbooks do. The thought of seeing the character being concieved and growing up is something that we though would make the audience connect a lot. Whilst growing up he comes into a lot of situations that others would in growing up, such as hitting puberty and growing up, meeting his first love, breaking up, doing GCSE's, going to uni, and finally going traveling where he comes back and gets engaged, married and has a child.


After me and Jack created the synopsis, and I had drawn a rough storyboard a long the way, it was clear when looking back on it that we had focused a lot more on the growing up stages of his life rather than the travelling aspect.We had a group meeting and decided that to enable us to focus more on the travelling, we would have to make some tweeks and development to the original idea. The first thing was to cut down the growing up stages a lot. We would have everything as before, with the baby scan, the first day at school etc. Where we had him meeting his first love and breaking up with them whilst at a young age, we decided that we would carry on their relationship throughout their lifetime. So, rather than having scenes of them breaking up, they will be replaced by scenes of them building up their relationship and spending time together, such as playing in the park on the swings when they're young and going on dates together when they get older.


Our hopes are that from cutting down the growing up stages and having him grow up quicker than we had originally anticipated, we will be able to make the most of what we can from the travelling scenes. As I have said before, we have decided to cut out the part where him and his girlfriend break up at a young age. Instead, they stay together throughout their life. In order to make sure that we had a proper storyline, with a beginning, confliction and resolution, we thought the best way to go around this would be to have the characters girlfriend decide she wants to go travelling on her 18th Birthday.

As much as her boyfriend would like to join her, he has decided to go to uni, and hopes to see her when she gets back. Whilst in the process of being at uni, his girlfriend sends him postcards from everywhere she's been saying 'cease the day'. This then inspires him to go travelling when he graduates. Even though the both of them are travelling, they don't travel together, to make sure they can make the most of their time, in their own company. The couple the re-unite at the end of the story in a country where they get engaged, and marry in the sunset. They then come home where the opening shot is seen again, and they conceieve a baby.


Whilst we were developing the idea, we thought of having the boyfriend go looking for her whilst she travelling. We would show this by having a blue dot for him and a pink for her, on a world map, showing their paths and their dots just missing each other. Although myself and Jack liked this idea, Blair and Kelly reminded us about our target audience, being 18-30, and how the idea of them looking for each other wouldn't be suitable to our target audience. We agreed with this, as it isn't something that our age group would be intersted in watching, and so we changed to the story line above, which we feel will work a lot better.