The Beginning of my thinking process: what could be done, as a story of a journey with characters not having legs:

The best concept for a short, understandable and easily conveyed story with any type of character: would be a story with a moral, like children’s bedtime stories for example.

I was interested to share with my group the idea of making a short animation about a children’s story of our own.

References/ research:

Story references: grimm’s fairy tales (little red riding hood), fables of Fontaine/ monster stories like a folk tale about babaika, the boogey man

Story reference/ inspiration for the art style: Kolobok 1956, the tale of the sandman 1992, the tale of tales specifically the lullaby 1979.

Ideas we didn’t use and why:

1. Ideas I shared with my group:

• A tale of a strawberry with an adventurous spirit wanting to explore. She is reminded several times about the dangers; she ignores it and dies after venturing too far – could have worked but not many characters would be animated.
• A tale of selkies and humans destroying their homes – wasn’t approved by the whole group and wouldn’t work with the rule of no legs.

2. Ideas thought of by the group:

• A tale of jam jars dancing but not being careful enough with each other and one of them falls and breaks – doesn’t fit into the ideas of a journey.
• A tale with a mother bat and her children, and the journey of her shy baby bat gaining confidence and finally getting out of the nest – could have worked but didn’t get all the teams approval.

Communicating with the team:

Common interest in making a children’s fairy tale with a grim ending. And an idea we liked, was conveying it in a form of a puppet show, to avoid legs and emphasize its for children.

We started off with some sketches of ideas we could go for the stage and style of puppets and tasked ourselves to come up with a story.