1.1
Concept Development
Concept development is the process of shaping the core vision, style, and themes of your animation. It includes:
Concept Brainstorming: Generating and exploring initial ideas for your story, characters, and visual style.
Core Theme and Message: Defining your central message and emotional tone that will guide your project. What do you want your audience to think or feel while watching your animation?
Story Outline: Sketching the key events and structure of your narrative.
World Building: Crafting a rich and immersive setting by defining the story's culture, history, and rules, which then informs the design of environments and settings that bring the narrative to life.
Character Profiles: Crafting detailed backstories, traits, and motivations for characters to enrich the narrative.
Pitching: Presenting the vision to others for feedback. What parts did they find interesting?
The larger your project, the more important it can be to write down your vision and ideas so you can refer back to them later. This can help you stay on track during your project. It serves as the north star that guides every subsequent step, ensuring consistency, direction, and a cohesive vision.
For example, if creating a series, after each episode you may want to come back and add additional details to your world definition to help with consistency of future episodes.
Create a Concept Document for your next creation. Flesh out the following sections.
Logline: Write a one sentence description of your concept. Include the protagonist (the main character), their goal or central conflict, and what obstacles or stakes they face. "A young farm boy discovers he is the last hope to save the galaxy when he joins forces with a group of rebels to destroy an evil empire's powerful weapon." (For Star Wars: A New Hope)
Concept comparison: Refer to other work that inspires you. "Mary Poppins, but in a Blade Runner environment."
Core Theme and Message: Summarize the core theme and message behind your creation. "There can be joy and love even in dark dystopian futures."
Story Outline: Write a brief outline of the story. This could be a list of bullet points for key plot points, a scene by scene initial draft of the screenplay, whatever makes sense for your creation. You are not writing the script, just putting bones on the story. If it is a series, it might be an overview of the entire series, or a summary of each season.
World Building: Write down the world the story is taking place in. This section can grow as you flesh out the script.
Character Profiles: List the main characters. Write down their mannerisms, backgrounds, wants and needs (a character may want to travel the world, but need to earn enough money just for food).