CONCEPT
Imagine a dense green forest, its rugged trunks rise high while the roots reach deep into the earth, the smell of the loam, the sound of the wind rustling the branches and leaves, the feel of its cool embrace as you walk through its depths.
The sound of water babbling and dancing its way over everything in its path emanates from a nearby river. In the distance there is a gentle lapping of waves at the edge of a great loch as they meet outlying rocks and a craggy shoreline.
High above you in the canopy birds sing to each other in a rich polyphony and insects glisten where the light filters through.
On the forest floor in these light wells grow vibrant, fragrant flowers that delight and sustain the furry and the fowl, now imagine this beautiful scene with magic and a fairy tale castle… this is where we started.
Initially this episode was just going to be a series of drone flights over ‘The Vale’ with me (Thea) doing a voice over to introduce it to you, but then I got the idea to make a phoenix your tour guide and much more… so this episode has had a bit of scope creep.
Idea
This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first episode of our planned YouTube studio diaries.
This idea came to me after watching the latest videos from two of my favourite content creators in quick succession; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone shots of the stunning Swedish forest that surrounds where they each live. I’ve known for a long time that I really wanted to have similar shots in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires us. But as we sadly don’t live somewhere quite so picturesque as Jonna and Rosie at the moment I knew this sort of footage was going to be hard to do without driving large distances on a regular basis. I was pondering this dilemma when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
Evolution
The initial project plan was to do a drone flight over a small forest and a single turret castle for the title sequence and some more focused location and atmospheric shots of the castle for the B roll. However as we worked our way through the concept phase of the world build lots of new ideas for little character sequences in the various areas we were building kept popping into our heads. After a lot of discussion we decided to follow the creative flow and see where it took us. So Thea fully indulged her fantasy of living in a fairytale castle nestled deep in an enchanted woodland!
The world has now evolved to include a large castle and a valley where the forests, waters, glens and caves are home to all manner of magical creatures and plants. While the project has developed into a full series of episodes.
Plan
Our plan with this series is to work our way up to the more ambitious stories we have in the pipeline by focusing on different techniques, skills and aspects of modelling, rigging and animation in each episode. This approach should also help us build our visual and audio story telling skills as each episode will focus on a new character and require different ways of shooting the animation sequences and new thematic material for the music score.