The Motion Juste: Final Project GMA

After the project's assessment I was contacted by two local TV channels from the Maresme region to interview me in relation to my final project, which had been marked 10, an article was published in Mataró's local online newspaper, Capgròs, and Ràdio 4, from RNE, phoned me for another interview some days later.

The recording of the former has been very kindly sent to me by Maiola, who interviewed me, and I want to thank her, not just for this favour but for the interview, which was the one I felt more comfortable at.

My initial idea was to create a geometric style, simple and original, specially for the characters, but I finally chose to draw them in a style I was already used to, influenced by the Japanese comic. Between the several existing styles in this type of comic I decided to use the so-called “shonen”, appearing in comic-books for boys, instead of the “shojo” comic-book style, aimed at girls, in which designs are more stylized and exaggerated. Thus, Beauty doesn’t have big eyes nor a thin constitution, but a rounded face and real-size eyes. Regarding the Beast, he’s got a strong constitution that makes him different from shojo’s usually slender and thin male characters.

These are the designs of the main characters:

Once the story had been selected, I had to structure the application in different parts. This way, the program offers the user the opportunity to choose from different ways of use: they can access the interactive multimedia version, in which a voice reads the text, there are sounds and music and many activities can be played as the story goes on; or they can just read the text, that goes along with some illustrations; finally, they can just access the activities through a secondary menu. Besides, as an extra, an animated short film is included about another Beauty character, the Sleeping one.

For the interactive version I had to write new endings. Apart from the classical one, I included two realistic ones, an ironic and a protest one, all invented by me.

Keeping this structure in mind I had to plan the navigation though the screens, the elements needed to move along the pages and the multimedia they would contain, in order to start creating them and giving form to the project in Flash.

The first step of the creative process was the selection of the tale. I wrote a list of the ones I knew and re-read most of them: tales by the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Jean de La Fontaine, Charles Perrault, Giambattista Basile, etc. And I also read some books about the interpretation of the traditional narrative. The aim was to find a story I liked, with not too many characters so I would have enough time to design and to draw them.

While I was re-reading the story about “The Beauty and the Beast” I remembered many details I had forgotten, like the presents the daughters ask their father to bring them or the ring that magically brings Beauty back home. All this reminded me about my childhood and the feelings the original story aroused in me, so I made up my mind and chose that tale. I gathered information about the original version by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (1695-1755) and about the shortened revision written by the French aristocrat Jean-Marie Le Prince du Beaumont (1711-1780), whose version has remained as the most-known.

I decided to adapt a bit the story to the present days and conceptions, so I gave Beauty a more active role: she’s the one that decides to go to the Beast’s castle in her father’s place, she picks the rose from the Beast’s garden and accepts the consequences of her own deeds. The character from the original version represented pity, self-sacrifice and obedience. I wanted her to be self-confident and go-ahead, after nowadays western women.

The main aim of this project was to create the multimedia application but it was also my intention to develop the necessary documentation a professional studio would need to complete such project. I created the narrative and technical scripts, the so-called configuration sheets reflecting the constant elements of the screens and I did an estimation of the resources a studio would need to create and commercialize a more extended and detailed version of the application.

I must underline the fact that a complete version of this kind of product with commercial or educative purposes would need a big team of professionals working on it for a longer period. Keeping this in mind, my project should be approached as a prototype, a small-scale application that would need further development.