‘Final Year Project’
The original plan for the ‘Vale of Araluen’ was that it would serve as a university/art school style ‘final year project’. A short project that we could apply everything we’d learned during our ‘teaching ourselves Blender’ era to consolidate our knowledge and also begin to grow our skills and develop our art style.
The initial idea was to create an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences of our imagined castle HQ for the first episode of our YouTube studio diaries.
My (Thea’s) inspiration came from two of my favourite YouTube creators; Jonna Jinton and Roaming Wild Rosie. Their videos always have incredibly beautiful cinematic drone sequences and establishing shots of the stunning forest that surrounds where they each live in Northern Sweden. I really wanted to have similar sequences in our videos given our love of the natural world and what inspires our work. 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 one day after watching their latest videos when the idea bloomed in my head to create an animated version of these beautiful sequences, but with a fairytale twist!
Concept Evolution
Start Small?!
The concept for our first episode was ‘the one where we introduce ourselves and the Vale of Araluen, the imaginary HQ of Ayane Studios’. The plan was to do a couple of drone flights over a small forest and a single turret castle, start small we said…. but as you might have gathered this plan has experienced a fair amount of ‘scope creep’.
This occurred as we worked our way through the concept phase of the world build, when 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 I fully indulged my fantasy of living in a fairytale castle nestled deep in an enchanted woodland!
The Vale of Araluen has now evolved to include a large castle nestled in 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.
The underlying concept for this first episode is still the same, however further scope creep happened near the end of the world build when I had the idea to replace the drone with a phoenix out on a surveillance sortie. I had been trying to figure out how to feature the phoenix for a long time as it is a significant emblem for us and Ayane Studios and I felt it was important to include it in our first animation.
mise-en-scène
Imagine
I wrote this mise-en-scène in my sketchbook when I was thinking about the concept for this project, it was inspired by the feelings and memories of some of my favourite hikes;
Imagine a dense green forest, its rugged tree trunks rising 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. While 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…