Friday, 28 October 2011

The story of Fluff and Billy Part 2 - Developing the idea

I now had an idea for a story where one character copies everything the other character does. I decided that to make the story more interesting, the two friends should fall out at some stage before making up again at the end.

I then had to think about:

What or who would the two characters be?

What actions would they be doing/copying?

How would they fall out?

How would they make up?

As my previous projects on the MA had involved child characters, I decided to make these animals of some kind. I thought about two bears or a bird and a bear but decided that the characters needed to be a similar scale so they could interact easily. I used to work as a Christmas card designer before starting the MA, so maybe the idea of penguins was a leftover from those days - my top 4 Christmas characters were always: 1. Santa: 2. reindeer: 3. snowman and 4. penguins! (If I remember I'll post some of my old designs closer to Christmas)! I thought the contrast of black and white penguins on water and snow would work well so I made my decision......penguins!

I then started working on very rough story boards - drawing thumbnail ideas of what the two penguins would get up to.


As you can see, these were very basic! I wanted their actions to fit into their environment so things like sliding, swimming and splashing seemed to be the way to go.

I originally called the penguins Scruff and Billy - Scruff was big and scruffy and I just liked the name Billy for a little penguin! But when I was drawing Scruff, he looked more fluffy than scruffy, hence the name change!



Initially, I thought the pair could fall out by getting carried away when spinning each other around. One of them would take a tumble and get in a mood. However, I thought it might be better if the copier deviates from the pattern at some point and so when Fluff rolls a snowball, Billy throws a snowball.....straight at Fluff!

The making up started off as Fluff pulling a funny face to make Billy laugh but soon switched to a spot of tummy tickling!




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