Week 3 has come to an end and i am almost done with the concept art for the character, i got the approvals i need for the characters i made, my professor took the liberty to pick the character he liked most, and that was the character i will be going with.
the flower i picked for that character is the bird of paradise flower, which is a tropical and very colourful plant, that will help in making the character stand out in the scene, and will also be fun to texture! i picked that particular flower because of it's beautiful symbolism, i found these notes https://www.ftd.com/blog/share/bird-of-paradise-meaning-and-symbolism on the symbolism of this plant and i just instantly fell in love, and i think the viewers will too. seeing as it is a symbol of love and faithfulness, i felt it would be great as a romantic companion, it is also perfect as i love the concept of males being more colourful and beautiful than the females (similar to most birds in the animal kingdom) so this will be fun to develop.
apart from the male character, i was also working on the baby concept for the end of our movie, yes it is a brief moment but it will be very symbolic, and will be the reason for why we did this film. we are going of a concept called "Hybridity" which means the blending of 2 races and the creation of a whole new race, i read several documents on this concept and this one https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/hybridity has a good summary of what the term means, it explains how hybridity exists in not just interracial mixture, but also in architecture, science and even beliefs. i myself am a big fan of combining two different things and creating a brand new item, in this project, we are breeding two completely different plant types and coming up with a hybrid child, which is the baby at the end of the film. i love this concept because where i come from, interracial marriage is not a normal thing to practice, people prefer to marry the same ethnicity as their selves and it kills the concept of marriage for me. i want to inject people with this to show them the beauty of mixing cultures. another pretty good report on this concept is https://www.academia.edu/983785/Hybridity_in_Postmodern_Literature_and_Architecture the author does a good job explaining the origins of this concept and it's impact. i will give it a more thorough read as i am fascinated by this idea.
my team mate and i also decided to relocate the events in our story, rather than a lavish hotel we decided to go with a more rustic scene, our professor advised us to think about locating this in a place like Bali or Hawaii, and we loved the idea. it is perfect as well because after reading further about the bird of paradise plant, it is an essential part of Hawaiian culture, so this was a great fateful coincidence! i will be working on a simple colour scheme for the male character and i will enjoy designing the baby, i will update more in the next blog!