Announcing The Vale of Araluen <em>Our first animation project has officially started! Here is an introduction to it and a look at what’s ahead.</em>
Just over a year ago we started development and preproduction on our first animated project ‘The Vale of Araluen’; an enchanted land that is home to our imaginary HQ as well as a multitude of magical creatures and plants.
The project has grown and evolved a lot during the initial development phase from a simple drone flight into a series of short episodes about each of the creatures and their habitats - think David Attenborough documentaries but set in a fantasy world.
The first releases from this project will be two small fragments; an introduction to the world and a trailer for future episodes.
Forest in Northern Sweden - Hans Ott
Idea and Initial Concept
Part of our grand plan for AYANE Studios is to share the whole production process for each of our projects on our YouTube channel as a series of studio diaries. This project began with the idea of creating an animated title sequence and some short B roll sequences for the first of those diaries, our ‘introducing us’ episode.
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!
The original concept was a drone flight over a forest and 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 initial world build we had 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 with this project which meant that the world and the project grew and evolved pretty significantly.
Concept Evolution - A Magical Flora and Fauna Sanctuary
Given that I had complete cart blanche for this project I have fully indulged my fantasy of living in a beautiful 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 all of which are protected by strong wards and veiling spells. While the concept has developed from a simple title sequence into a full series of episodes.
Our plan with this series is to gradually work our way up to the really ambitious stories we have in the pipeline by focusing on different techniques, skills and aspects of 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.
Hopefully this plan will also help us to hush our pesky imposter syndrome gremlins along the way too!
Aerial view of The Vale of Araluen
State of the Vale
We have completed the first phase of the world build, so the castle, gates, bridges and the basic layout of the world are all done. Currently we are working on the first two video releases from The Vale of Araluen; the introduction to the world and the trailer for future episodes.
But before we can create these videos we have quite the job list to work our way through! From developing the look of the world art style, lighting, textures and palette through to rigging and animating the characters, programming the camera shots and composing the music score.
Life, Love and Loss
You might be wondering why it has taken us an entire year to get to where we are.
Sadly we had to stop work on the project not long after we started because my beloved cocker spaniel Alfie Bear was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer.
At 16 years old the prognosis wasn’t good and coupled with dementia and recurring vestibular syndrome he needed a lot of extra TLC and we wanted to spend as much time with him as possible while we could. He fought with everything he had but when his liver started to fail we had to make the horrendous decision that no one who loves their dog ever wants to have to make.
Driving away from the veterinary hospital the night I had to say goodbye to my beautiful, beautiful bear is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. It felt wrong to my core, for 16 years and three months making sure he was happy, healthy and safe was the most important thing in my life and suddenly he was gone.
I was completely and utterly heartbroken - I still am - he was such a gentle and beautiful old soul and the centre of my universe. The void created by his loss and that of his beautiful brother Jasper Bean a year and a half earlier (again to the beast that is cancer - this time melanoma in his mouth) was so vast and all consuming. For many, many months it felt hard to breathe and like my heart was actually going to tear itself into pieces it hurt so much.
I read once that grief is love with nowhere to go and that’s why it hurts the way it does. I think this is true as the pain in my heart felt like the exact opposite of the joy, love, connection, and comfort both our boys gave us so unconditionally their entire lives. Being their human is the greatest privilege of my life, the most precious gift I’ve been given and I’m so grateful for the time we got to share together. I miss them every second of every day and always will.
Summer turned into Autumn, then Autumn turned into Winter before I was able to find a way of keeping my head above the waves of crushing sadness, guilt and emptiness. Eventually, one cold Winter’s day I found enough will to begin working on the project again and now many months later still, I feel ready to begin sharing the process of creating the Vale of Araluen with you here in our journal.
In many ways The Vale of Araluen has become a tribute to our beautiful boys. The new ideas we’ve had during the preproduction phase include so many references to the stunning landscapes and the wild raw beauty of nature that we’ve found while hiking with our beautiful furry monsters. The times we spent on adventures with Alfie and Jasper are our most treasured and precious memories so putting these references in and working on them has been a really good way for me to focus on the wonderful memories we have from our time together rather than focusing on the loss - art and music therapy of sorts.
To vlog or blog… that is the question…
Although going forward we want to share the production process of our projects with you via our video studio diaries, we have decided to share the production of these first two releases as a series of blog posts in a project journal. There are a few reasons for this decision;
I’m horrendously camera shy at the best of times, but after losing Alfie I don’t really feel like being filmed at the moment, but I still want to try and share our endeavours.
There has been a staggering amount to learn - and still is - with this being our first animation project. The last couple of years have been like going back to university to retrain, but in addition to studying I’ve also had to figure out what I need to learn and curate the course at the same time. In many ways the Vale of Araluen is our ‘Final Year Project’ and we want it to be the first video people see from us. Hopefully it will be a beautiful fairy tale animation.
So we thought that doing blog posts was a good compromise, as it will help give me a sense of purpose again and the accountability of some deadlines to work to. But it’s just being slightly kinder to ourselves as it has reduced the to do list a little - removing the whole ‘learn how to film and edit YouTube videos’ block from the ‘things we need to learn’ list allowing us to just focus on the core work of learning how to create and produce 3D animated films.
Over the coming months we plan to do a post every couple of weeks where we will share what we’ve been up to. Hopefully these posts will also mean that the format of our studio diary videos will be a bit more honed when we get to that stage.
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Texture Inspiration : Arrietty : Studio Ghibli
Next Time
I’m planning to do a post that will focus on the design of Castle Araluen, the inspirations behind it and how I built it. In the meantime if there is anything you’d like to know more about, please let us know in the comments. Thank you for reading, if you got this far award yourself a biscuit and a cup of tea!
