When I started thinking about this project I was not sure if there was anyway for me to bring together a product that really embodied what it was that I wanted to experiment with and learn about. I knew that I wanted to primarily work with story, but taking suggestions from my professor, I thought about working with video. Video was a field that I worked with and loved earlier in my college career but, for some reason, never had much chance to come back to. My professor suggested that this project would be the gateway through which I could experiment with the IMM fields that I am passionate about. That being said, I decided that I really wanted text, video, and some 3D elements in my project. Now the challenge was to figure out how these things could possibly come together. Obviously, the primary portion of the project would be story. As aspiring writers, my writing partner and I really wanted to take advantage of this project to show off what we can do and focus on crafting this skill. So we would definitely be writing a story and the scope would be that of a short novel. Now to bring in the video portion.
Originally, I was positive that I wanted to either focus on making 3D characters and environments for short, 3D animated flavor scenes throughout the story but I soon realized that I had neither the time nor the skill to do this. Then I wondered if I could use live action film and add 3D costumes and weapons to my actors. This ambitious idea was also put down when I realized how difficult it would be to accomplish. Our next attempt was to use a web-based interface for the entire project. We were going to have the home page laid out like a crime scene and you would click new items from the story as they were placed in the room to bring up the narrative. Each section would have a video at the beginning or the end. We realized in time that this was a haphazard and very impractical way of putting together our project. Eventually, my professor showed me a TED talk in which images were projected onto a physical book on stage. This gave me the idea to add live action film into a physical book with augmented reality.
Now it was time to refine our story. My partner and I had worked together to make an interactive story-telling project the year before. We knew how to craft a story together, although our previous attempt was much more rushed and less professional. We began with a few story ideas that we had left over from our old project. Some included medieval knights possessed by fire demons on a quest for revenge. We had another about a monarch's son and his friend - an assassin who was contracted by a secret order to take out the other character's father. Our biggest concern with crafting this story was avoiding cliches as much as we could. We found that a lot of our initial ideas for stories often sounded like something we had heard recently or would lead into a very common story trope. With this in mind, we tried to craft the climax of our story into something that no one would have ever seen coming and this would hopefully serve to really push the main theme across. Theme was another very important story point. I personally really wanted to focus on a universal thought that can be taken away from understanding the character development throughout the story. I wanted my story to stick with the reader in a way that made them think differently about certain situations in their life.
The main template from the story was eventually taken from an old idea that my partner had. Two orphans - brother and sister - who were living on the street, come into contact with a street gang that uses heavily exaggerated and fantastical alchemy. We thought about how we could develop the characters in this story while also fairly splitting up the writing and found that some changes had to be made. Soon our brother and sister duo became brothers who were much older than originally intended. They were not actually related but found family in eachother through their years spent together in an orphanage. We kept the street gang but evolved them into a full-on, world-wide crime syndicate and introduced a third character who works for this gang but also befriends the two orphans.
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