Final Project: Brainstorming

Whilst reading Exploring Character Design, I came across some tips in the chapter about research, inspiration and ideas, and some of the best ways to come up with ideas include brainstorming. Obviously that's a given. Brainstorming is a very efficient way to leak all your thoughts onto paper and to link them together in different ways. Anything and everything you think of can be jotted down onto these diagrams. 

However it was pointed out, and I took note, that sometimes things like that are easy to forget, if you're simply just scribbling things down on paper. Some suggestions were made, like writing on different pieces of paper and treating them like a jigsaw, or maybe pinning ideas to a wall. Basically, something visual that sticks in your mind since a lot of people have good graphic memory.

I know I do. So I took this advice and have been brainstorming across my wardrobe... O_o I can just go back to it, stand it front of it and jog my memory of all my brainchildren, good, bad or otherwise. 

 

This has been hanging on my wardrobe for the best part of 6 weeks now, since I came home for the summer, and I have to say it works really well. I look at it almost every morning I wake, and it's so easy to add other random ideas that might get sparked by something. Sometimes I'll be downstairs and have a sudden revelation. All it takes is to jog up to my room, grab a sticky note and add it to the web of ideas. It means that everything is at hand, regardless of whether all of it makes the cut or not.

The only irritating thing is that I'm heading back to Preston in less than a month, so I'll have to try and move the entire thing. In the meantime, however, it's helping my project to come together nicely.

I'm brainstorming everything, from characters - what kinds of characters would exist, where and why etc - to environments, the physical structure of the world they live in, the kinds of things which co-exist and are coherent with each other... etc etc. Even as I've started designing and gesture drawing, I still get ideas and I still pop them up on my wardrobe web. 

Might be some of the best advice I've taken to do with generating ideas. It's certainly working. 

As for the journal, I even considered the style of it, since I'm trying to go for authenticity in terms of it looking like it has come straight from the world I'm designing. Basically the world I am creating is going to be largely inspired by the High Middle Ages, albeit a fictitious one in the fantasy genre. At this time anyway. It is subject to change of course, should development dictate, as is everything.