It was an interesting challenge to create an imaginative story from the recording. Of the recordings provided, the second one was definitely the one that appealed to me the most. It is a conversation between a man with a mature sounding voice and a little girl, and the conversation sounds a bit bizarre to me (I’m not sure I fully understand what they are saying, as it sounds too fantastical).
And why would such a young girl be conversing comfortably with a strange man much older than herself? I was naturally reminded of a classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice also goes on a fantastical adventure as a young girl, and I decided to use this story as the basis for a fantasy of my own girl’s amazing story.
During the research phase, a large number of related entries on Pinterest about Alice in Wonderland again provided an important boost. As an enduring IP, many of the key elements of this work are already evident in these secondary creations, which I was able to easily draw inspiration from.
For example, the fantastic creatures and the deep forest, two elements of the story that appear in many of the illustrations, seem to me to be the most important elements that reflect the fantastic and slightly scary atmosphere of Alice in Wonderland. I have therefore chosen to intentionally include these elements in my subsequent storytelling as well, as a way of enhancing the mood of the ambience in the story.
First, there is the character design of the main character of the story, the little girl in the recording. I have named her Quess, and as the appearance suggests, she is a petite and lovely girl. I have deliberately exaggerated her proportions to reinforce the ‘elf’ feel of her: she does in fact have the pointy ears of an elf, which comes from her half-elf blood.
The recording mentions that she was bought by her mother in a shop for a penny, which sounds rather unbelievable. In the storyline I envisage, the girl was originally an elf who was taken out of the forest by a human hunter and sold in a human city. However, a kind lady bought her and raised her until her death. And in the present, after the death of her mother, the young elf girl returns to the mysterious forest to find her past ……
The second character, who is a fantastic character that I hold in high regard, is the source of the older mature male voice in the recording. I named him Mr. Watson. You can see from the changes in the character artwork that his image went through many revisions before being finalised. This is because I envisaged him as the ’embodiment of the forest’ in the story, the image of nature itself. Mr Watson, who is responsible for guiding our little girl through the story, is incredibly wise and, of course, full of the sophistication that has been honed over time.
Having established these important settings, I gradually tended to make him look cute but playful, with the shape of his eyes revealing a slightly mocking attitude. It is worth mentioning that I deleted several designs of characters with inconspicuous mouths at one point, as the project requirements mentioned that the character needed to have a full mouth structure.
As for the design of the setting, it goes without saying that it is naturally the classic deep, dark and mysterious forest. As the two people in the recording don’t seem to be moving during the conversation, I envisaged them sitting and talking together, and the forest at night was the perfect place for this. To enrich the light and enhance the ambience, I also lit a campfire for them to converse in a warm setting. The environment was re-drawn from real life photographs, and the lighting and colour choices were based on real life images of campfires in the forest.