Visualizing a World

I guess nows the better time if any to drop the curtain on my latest business proposal lined up with my ex-boss Nathan Wagoner. Two years ago I took a course with him called "Hypermedia" which is a class dedicated to topics that are considered beyond media. For that semester we discussed and created flash animations. This year I helped Nathan by being a teacher's assistant for the course. Throughout the year we had discussions back and forth over the similarities between flash and toy theater when we came up with the idea to create flash animation so anyone can do it and that we would give "kits". These "kits" would contain pre-constructed characters with histories, likes and dislikes, as well as props and back drops. The purpose was that when given these "kits" people wouldn't have to worry about the technical ability to create flash animations and could focus more on story telling, composing music for the scene, or even focus purely on animation without all that Photoshop stuff.

Since our multiple discussions we have come up with a business proposal in order to get what is initially going to be a website up and running. My job is to create a visual for how we are going to present all these wonderful sets and characters so our users can download them. The initial idea was to create a building cut away, sort of like the boat cut away in Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic. This really limited us to just the setting of a city and what we want our users to be thinking about is how to take their stories and animations to the unreal and imaginative. So I struggled with this. How do you show multiple locations to choose from without a birds eye or any other cheesy effect. That's when the idea came to me as I was showering this morning.

Our business is called "Small Imaginings", which plays off of the size of toy theater but the larger possibilities that exist in the structure of what we are giving people. So why not show our worlds inside the mind of a person. Like a building cut away except that building is the human mind. When I told Nathan he told me that it was exactly like phrenology, and it was (see image above).

Wow I wrote a lot. But here is the ending. (Drum roll) this is how we show all the settings and all the characters we have to offer - the cut away of the human mind, displaying all the small imaginings within.