First FMP Ideas

I am torn in the decision making process for my university Final Major Project. For the past year I’ve been attracted to the idea of creating a small scene, characters and creatures from James Gurney’s ‘Dinotopia’, but now, living in India, there is so much culture and vibrancy that I can’t ignore as a potential project.

The only problem would be choosing the specific characters, creatures and possible environment to replicate, it would have to be awesome to ensure I would maintain interest for the entirety of 5 months. I will keep uploading images from my Indian explorations here, this weekend we’re planning to go temple hunting with one of the locals who works with us so I’m sure we’ll see incredible things. The rickshaws and food stalls outside work are interesting as it is, so imagine how the places of worship look! Maybe these trips will be enough to help me make my decision between the two project ideas.

I’m sure that creating a scene, a human character and some dinosaurs from Dinotopia would be a sufficient project to keep me busy, not to mention interested for the 5 month period of production. Look, it’s beautiful, not to mention I have a strong emotional tie to the world from my childhood:

I could also make studies of Gurney’s art to keep up with visual design, there’s so much to learn from his style and use of colour. I already own all of his books so I have plenty of reference and artistic guidelines from his ‘Imaginitive Realism’ and ‘Colour and Light’.

I am not so confident that replicating items and people from reality would be as interesting for me. I think this project is my last chance in university to be really expressive before I become a full time studio employee - it’s a shame but I barely have time for personal work and I’m not even in crunch time! It may just be down to my own working ethics, but though the deadlines aren’t so demanding I feel the need to work to my highest standard in the shortest possible time to prove myself capable. Maybe after a few weeks the feeling will fade, but hopefully I can work hard and open up more opportunities for the university, and for myself.

I finally found some English tea so I'm more awake at work! Hopefully skype will help with the homesickness, but there’s still no internet in the apartment. They say it’ll be up and running by Monday, so maybe we’ll get it this time!