Peer Brainstorming 21.10.20
Tentative Story Beats
The Uncanny Hound - Elaborated:
I found myself in another brainstorming session, this time with Sheza Rani, a fellow MA Games student and good friend. As someone who worked on storyboarding and concept art for her last module, I generally like to bother Sheza when I'm looking for good sources on how to put together my work. For this session we walked each other through our current work progression, sharing resources and project outlines and iterative changes that we've gone through so far.
I won't go into details about the session as it was long and I wouldn't want to disclose elements of her project on my (publicly available) blog without her consent, but mostly I was searching for some inspiration on what my cases should be. I told her about the scary dog, frozen in time and came up with the following, starting idea, for how to turn it into story beats:
The protagonist wakes up in the night, perhaps to go to the bathroom, or get some water.
They walk past their dogs in the dimly lit room.
They stop, feeling something is wrong.
Turning around they see the dog staring into space.
A close up of the dog follows (to be turned into a case polaroid). This ought to be nail-bitingly uncanny imagery...
I'm so happy to have come up with some actual story beats for this concept after so long of struggling, but cannot help but feel unsatisfied with the results. Too many beats that are neither concise enough or effective enough - why should the audience care? Why should they feel impacted by this series of images on their own? I need more uncanny... or at least more exposition about character details.
Photoshop vs Procreate (Again):
I'm finding myself hesitating a lot more than expected when considering this transition between these two programmes. Sheza explained to me that she got caught up a lot in research at the start of her last module as well and that, retrospectively, she wished she had done more drawing right off the bat. I noted, upon seeing her work that I had done the same, and somehow lost a great portion of time to the research and blogging. This admittedly has been pretty awesome, but does leave me a bit concerned, as I'm already running a tad 'behind', that trying to learn a brand new programme alongside it may be more of a hindrance at this stage.
I'm not set on a decision about this, but I don't want to cause any creative blocks by stressing about it, so for now I will just say that its not super important to me to switch to Photoshop anymore. If I have the time and desire to, I will, but I'm no longer prioritising it as a must-do for this project - especially as it's more for my personal benefit rather than changing anything about the project or narrative.
This unexpected interest in creative blogging though has struck my interest - and even Sheza pointed out that I could aim for a career on this path as it seems to come naturally (and happily) to me. A thought for the future - and one that helps me feel a little less like I've been 'wasting' my time so far.
NOTES:
Get to drawing! Sheza has learned from experience that it's not good to wait for any reason - start! Start!
Noah Bradley - Speed Painting <--- check it out... The Fundamental of Landscapes.
I have decided to set a small deadline for myself to get as much of the storybeats down by end of October as I can so I can spend November and early-December doing the character design and contemplating
Recommended to start Youtube-ing Photoshop tutorials even in the sketching phase.
Doubt about writing - maybe good that I have been stuck on detective. Maybe opportunity to finally think w pictures.
- R Cipolletta
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