Building Better Content - Ideas for the Animated Short - page 39

Kevin Andrus, Ringling College of Art and Design
The Ideal
The most linear path for getting and developing ideas comes from knowing your concept
fi rst. If you know what your piece is about, it is easy to determine early on which elements
you need to tell your story: the situation that will best convey your message, the characters
that will be in confl ict with your situation, and then, your genre, time period, lighting, cos-
tuming, and everything else.
This is the most straightforward approach because your theme or concept is what drives
everything else in your piece. It is the sounding board against which you place your possi-
bilities and if your possibilities do not support your concept, you eliminate them.
Chris Perry's piece Catch is an example of a piece that started with a concept:
Catch by Chris Perry, University of Massachusetts at Amherst