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Now I have all the necessary information for my project,

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and along with it,

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a visual archive that can help me in the creative process.

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With these references,

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I began to formulate ideas that would communicate the information,

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ideas, and brand attributes.

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Now I like to begin with written words instead of jumping straight to sketching.

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These are the words that I came up with to describe the idea of storytelling.

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Universal,

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struggle, personal, mythic, historic, comedy, and drama.

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Now I do this because over the years,

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I found if I start sketching visuals right away,

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I'm distracted.

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I begin to focus more on the look and style of something rather than the core concepts.

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This can come later,

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so I'm going to go back to just the written word at this point.

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Taking the idea of storytelling,

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I wrote down a set of symbols that might refer to the subject.

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What are the symbols for storytelling?

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Could it be a campfire where people tell ghost stories,

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books, an author at his typewriter,

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a pencil and a notepad?

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Feel free to just keep going.

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Don't edit yourself.

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Some ideas will be just plain stupid,

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and some might be great.

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I also thought about the idea of a journey,

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since journeys are typically part of any story.

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And along with that,

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what are those symbols?

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Road signs,

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a sailing ship, shoes, and

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maybe a library as a reference to storytelling.

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What are the easy-to-understand symbols I can use to convey an idea?

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And

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I don't stay away from cliches.

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I'm fine with them.

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They tell the idea quickly.

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Finally,

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I landed on the concepts of myths and stories that are common to most of us,

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and I made a long list of the different possible stories that we might all understand.

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I

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did a quick work session with people in my office to

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determine which stories still resonated and which ones didn't.

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It

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wasn't a big analysis.

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It was more about knowing the story and how it feels.

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Fairly quickly, several stories came to the top.

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Now,

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I decided to stay away from the modern film and television options,

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as they might be misunderstood as part of the actual festival.

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So,

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no Star Wars with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader,

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or Battlestar Galactica.

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Some

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didn't make the cut,

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like the myth of Prometheus or Don Quixote,

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since fewer people knew them.

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That's sad, whatever happened to literary education.

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In addition to the sketches,

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I drafted the narrative process as a diagram to better understand how the viewer responds to a story.

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Who,

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when, and how did a story evolve and change based on the style or where it was seen?

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Once I'd explored all of the written concepts,

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I moved on to sketching and creating a visual

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representation of the ideas.

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Now,

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at this point, I can start considering layout and composition.

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I

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made a list of the top 10 myths that I liked,

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and I started sketching.

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Now,

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don't worry about your sketches not being perfect.

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Move fast.

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My

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sketches are so bad that I can't tell what they are later,

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so I write down what each is to help me.

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I needed to determine how could I tell the story of William Tell,

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or David and Goliath,

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in one image with symbols.

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What

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elements had to be included for the story to be understandable?

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How

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far could I simplify the image?

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The

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apple, arrow, and a hat were at the center of the William Tell myth.

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All

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the other elements of the story led to this one iconic moment.

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The

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pivotal moment when David slays Goliath identifies the story.

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I

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also needed here to include a big scale change between the two for it to be clear that this is what the story was about.

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I

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tried other ideas also.

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Would prehistoric

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cave art, our earliest stories, work when incorporating a film reel into the hunt?

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In this instance, no.

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It read as Attack of the Wheels.

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One

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element I knew I wanted was the sense of delight and discovery.

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That meant not giving away the answer too fast,

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making the viewer do some work to determine the message.

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They remember it better that way.

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Of

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course, I could tell a story with a sequence of images,

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like a film reel,

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film strip, or comic book.

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But

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what was the most important element that identified that story?

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Here,

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zombies from The Night of the Living Dead.

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For

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the first presentation,

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I kept all the ideas in rough sketch form.

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I also used color sparingly, so

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nobody would be distracted by it.

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The

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best ideas can be killed because someone didn't like the sketch color.

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I want the client to imagine the

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finished product at this point in their head.

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A super tight comp might look great,

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but the concept starts to become less important when people fixate on all the tiny details.

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Fortunately,

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all went well.

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Robert

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Radford loved the idea and we were ready to go.

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The

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concept was approved and now I could make it more real and I could focus on the color palette.