Interactive Storytelling Summer 2022

SB #2 Interactive Story Proposal Research pt. 2

Seeing how Peter has changed from “Peter and Wendy” to Disney’s “Peter Pan” is really interesting.

Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy”. He looks very plain and child-like.

In Disney’s “Peter Pan” he looks elvish and more like a pre-teen than a kid. His clothes also look more advanced.

Its also cool to see how the character’s final look differs from the concept art. I’ve noticed that most of the time, there are less lines. Not necessarily that the design is simpler, just that there’s less lines.

A cool side-by-side comparison. In the novel, Peter’s clothes are made out of leaves and he’s barefoot. Very primitive. In the Disney movie, his clothes are quite sophisticated. Kinda reminds me of Robin Hood.

I find it cool that the 2003 live action stayed faithful to the clothes-made-out-of-leaves look.

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kawthar.mahdi

If you’ve lost your way in the IFStravaganza, you can always go back to the beginning.

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4 responses to “SB #2 Interactive Story Proposal Research pt. 2”

  1. Tommy Avatar
    Tommy

    Oh, I adore this so much! Art and character design is such a neat thing to research imo.

    The lack of lines in/detail in the Disney animated final version is because it would be difficult to animate that level of detail consistently. Especially with Disney’s animated movies, there are bigger jumps between early concepts vs final designs, as they need to be simplified as well as still recognizable and interesting. Concepts have the freedom to be as intricate as they like because they are only drawing it a few times, vs the frame by frame in a movie.

    Concept art is also an experimentation of sorts and can be in different styles than the movie as it is more of an exploration than the final piece. That makes it less restrictive to artists as the characters can look very different, versus (for example) the direction Disney has taken within the past 10 years of how they stylize women especially. We see the similarities between Elsa from Frozen and Rapunzel from Tangled in their final model, versus their insanely different early concept art.
    I great example of this would be early concept art for Frozen. One of my favourite Elsa designs is by Claire Keanue.

    1. kawthar.mahdi Avatar
      kawthar.mahdi

      That’s a great point! Especially since when Disney’s “Peter Pan” was made, everything was still drawn by hand. However, I’d think that these days, with the rise of 3D models, character designs can be a little more crazy. I don’t know if you’ve watched “Raya and the Last Dragon” but a common complaint people had with the movie was Sisu’s design. It’s the typical animal-that-looks-too-human situation that was common with Barbie movies as well. Also just the fact that Sisu didn’t really look like a naga (which is what she was supposed to be. You should look them up! Nagas look really cool!).
      I just searched up the Frozen concept art by Claire Keane. Elsa looks really cool! She almost looks like a villain though, so maybe thats why Elsa ended up looking very different.

  2. madeleine.joly Avatar
    madeleine.joly

    This is such an interesting idea! I really enjoy exploring art and how the same story can be represented in many different ways. I have a question for you, how will you add interactivity into your project? What will be the players role throughout this exploration. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Have fun creating!

    1. kawthar.mahdi Avatar
      kawthar.mahdi

      That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot. At first, I thought that a string of pearls storyline would be good, which would allow me to stay faithful to the Disney movie or J.M. Barrie’s novel. Then I considered the fact that players may want to explore Neverland in general (I know I did when I watched the movie) so a branching storyline that funnels into one ending would also work. That would, of course, be much more work. I would definitely like to keep the ending as the player going home, because I don’t exactly want the message of the game to be encouraging players to escape from reality and live delusional lives. Also, I like the emphasis on the importance of parenthood that the movie and the novel had, so I’d like to keep that. The interactivity would be similar to the IFstravaganza, in that there’s an action, maybe some dialogue, and the players reaches a plot point where they have to choose between two or more choices. However, the activity we did the other day kind of opened my eyes to different methods of interactivity, like the cards or the points. I especially liked the dice. After all, adventures are 50% chance and 50% choices, so that would be an interesting way of incorporating interactivity into my game.

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