Getting started.

When we were first given the brief I was so confused as I did not know what to base my project on. For days I thought of stories I had heard in the news or off friends. I thought of the stories for films and books, but everything seemed either to long or complicated.

So I decided to go to the library and try and get some inspiration from there.

I looked for books that were about getting started on a project and how to create ideas.

The first was "The Complete Animation Course" by Chris Patmore.

The first chapter said to get started I first had to have a character before I could put pen to paper, well I already knew this otherwise I would not have got the book out.

So I looked at the next book "How to be a Cartoonist" by Peter Maddocks. The first chapter in this book was asking the exact same question I was.

But all this told me again was to start drawing, but how could I draw when I had no theme or ideas, so I browsed onto the next chapter thinking I would get some answers when I seen the name of this chapter.

But again not the answers I was looking for, the best piece of advice it gave was "always carry pen and paper for notes because good ideas know no boundaries", heres hoping.

The next book I looked at did eventually lead to an idea. Hoorah.

The booked was called "Animation Unleashed" by Ellen Besen. I did find this book very helpful in that it said to try and look in hidden worlds, whether it be the hidden world of an insect, santa claus or your own mind. Which is where my idea eventually came out of. But it was what she said on "Generic thinking" that got my mind ticking, she said visual vocabulary can help to alleviate it. Which made think of what I had scrowled down in class that day, Lee said to "Research vocabulary we want to use in our pieces". So I decided to write down the vocabulary that was going through my head to see could this be the start of something.

But all that was coming into my head was CONFUSED, FRUSTRATED AND IN DESPAIR.

So I decided to stick these three words into thesaurus to see what I could come up with.

I liked some of the words it threw up and thought they would sound good in a cartoon. But I still needed to expand it further, so I decided to look at other peoples frustrations, confusion and despair, so I googled this.

The thing that interested me most was people's frustrations or pet hates so I decided to look into this further. And this is where I had my EUREKA moment.

There was my theme it had been staring at me in the face the whole time, WRITERS BLOCK.

Just as Ellen Besen had said sometimes you just have to look at the secret world going on in your own head.