I think my brainstorm is pretty self explanatory, but just to give some insight into my thought process as I was going along with the ideas the very first thing I felt I could commit to was an idea based around a mermaid and the water element. But I thought that I could equally get as excited about the element fire. When I initially think about fire I always consider myself to have a fiery personality being a Sagittarius and wanted to do something with the idea of a character being all fiery, I even considered doing a fight scene but then I thought about and analysed my skills as an animator so far and decided that the amount of referencing and pose to pose would be intense and I think I'd need a lot more time than we have to do something like that, so maybe I'll bare that in mind and do some practicing over the summer.
But I carried on to research fire and fire personalities and I came across this really insightful website which provided details on fire personalities, http://www.innerjourneyseminars.com/the-five-elements.html, and I thought that it would be really exciting to do a visual represention of a chinese man reading this description out and really focus on key elements of the mouth moving and layer fire into the image. But the more I thought about this idea the less stimulating it became as an idea, I think to be done successfully this idea would require precision. each of the key frames would have to be very precise, and I think visually if the focus is on the audio it wouldn't make sense to have fussy visuals so they would have to be very clean and stylised, I already know that which ever option I chose as I don't currently own a laptop it would have to be hand drawn. Therefore This idea would need a lot more development.
I decided that even though I didn't have any initial, initial idea's for air and earth I left it a week to mull them over and come up with some possibilities. I was talking to another student who was considering the possibility of the Greek Myth Icarus and after spending the evening watching Percy Jackson's Lightening bolt I started having brain waves the idea of using Medusa. I can actually picture the snakes idividually moving and the texture of the cold hard grey statues of the people she's frozen. As you can see above I started doing a rough storyboard, mainly in my head and I quickly realised it was a really complex story and to set the scene and ambience then it wouldn't actually be worth it for such a short brief. I then went completely the opposite way and was thinking about earth and rock and one path lead to another in my head and I was shortly thinking about a little Rock Band, and I didn't really have a narrative for them I thought if I was to do this idea then I would just concentrate of the movements of playing instruments and repeating bits and setting the background. And then I thought that actually as a narrative, story telling is my strength I need a narrative or it's not good enough for my name to sign it off.
NB: Writing this after I have finished my animatic I've come up with a really good story for the rocks, but it's a bit of a long idea so it might not of fit into the twenty second brief. What if they were addicted to rock music and like everytime they played it caused the particles in there bodies to vibrate so much they started to crack until they were too small to play music anymore, and it's message could be all about living life to the fullest.
And then finally another corker of an idea I had for air was to do with a wizard, see above. But I mulled over all my ideas and wrote my thoughts at the time about them down and realised it was time to stop coming up with so many I need to move on and focus on one. So much like I do when I go shoe shopping, trailing round for hours and finally going back to buy the first pair, I went with the water element and my mermaid idea and decided it was time for some Character Development. I wasn't feeling very inspired with character development so I just did some rough sketches see below and decided to crack on straight with the story board.
