I have been trying to think of how to start this blog, so I just thought I should start at the beginning, of where I got the idea to make this film. The idea for this film started back in February 2009, I was assigned a homework assignment to create a cartoon character and to show 5 views of the character. A front view, a quarter turn to the side view, a side view, a quarter turn to the back view, and finally a back view. Basically it made it look as if the character was turning. At this time I was brain storming, just trying to think of a character that would be interesting to draw. I wanted my character to have a humanoid appearance, whether or not it had an animal’s head or tail, didn’t matter to me I just wanted it to be interesting.
This is the first concept drawing that I came up with, I tried to draw her with a little bit of an attitude and show she is a bit of a tomboy. I tried to make her less of the typical fairy but more like her own person. I didn’t want to follow the same lines that everyone else seems to follow when they think of fairies. My train of thought was also on how much people incorporate magic into fairies. Especially when the fairy is the main character – they usually have a lot of magic. Therefore my train of thought was “if she didn’t have magic, she would have to have something else to compensate for it.” With toads being the size of VW Beatles and animals being the size of skyscrapers she would need a way to defend herself other then just flying. Hence why I added in the word “ninja”.
At the same time my little sister come across a bunch of youtube videos of A Tinkerbelle Movie. The movie was on youtube, about two weeks before the release date. The reason I know this, is because she was pointed this out. This made me wonder whose head’s were going to roll for this. Because it wasn’t just a few minutes it was the whole damn film itself. I thought it would be good to watch a little bit, before Disney tore it down like I know I would if things where reversed. I sat down and watch a little bit of the film. As I watched the film I noticed that this was mainly for girls, like you aren’t going to get a lot of boys to watch this kind of cartoon. It made me start to think and do a little background research into fairy pictures and animations.
As I looked and studied both the pictures and animation I noticed that no one really did anything to make the fairies that interesting. The most that anyone would do with a fairy is make them look cute or sexy. In a lot of the pictures that I found they seemed, posed with these huge elaborate wings, either flying around or just sitting looking pretty. The animation I looked at where even worse, most of them showed fairies dancing around like ballerinas or doing something on the girly side, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just when you have something and everyone is making it the same way, it gets kind of boring. And with fairies they have been mostly background characters. Helping a hero on a quest, and most often made to look pretty. And if a fairy is made the main character they don’t really take her out of that girl persona and to make it that she is a force to be reckoned with they give her magical powers to compensate for her size.
This got me thinking, why do fairies have to be that way? Can’t they be a little more of a tomboy or get a little dirty? So I decided for my homework assignment that I would make my own version of a fairy and see if I could do anything with it. I would explore this idea and see where it would take me.
This is the first concept drawing that I came up with, I tried to draw her with a little bit of an attitude and show she is a bit of a tomboy. I tried to make her less of the typical fairy but more like her own person. I didn’t want to follow the same lines that everyone else seems to follow when they think of fairies. My train of thought was also on how much people incorporate magic into fairies. Especially when the fairy is the main character – they usually have a lot of magic. Therefore my train of thought was “if she didn’t have magic, she would have to have something else to compensate for it.” With toads being the size of VW Beatles and animals being the size of skyscrapers she would need a way to defend herself other then just flying. Hence why I added in the word “ninja”.
The reason I named the fairy Dust was because it seemed like a good neutral name. It has all the aspects that a lot of people see in fairies but it also showed that she was a bit on the tough side. A lot of the typical things I kept with her were the wings and her supermodel body type. My reasoning for doing this was mostly for the people who already followed fairies and have a bit of an attraction for them. I wanted to make sure that this would also attract those people but not make them stir away from the character. I wanted this character to be more of an evolution of fairies more than anything. And with people who don’t follow fairies she would still LOOK the part of the stereotypical fairy.
I’ll continue this on my next blog entry as well as introduce more images along with some of the evolution of this project.
