Final Major Project (FMP) | Research Part 1

So this is where the idea stemmed from...a christmas card.

From this I started looking into what people believe in. I went to where I always go when starting a new project, my music library.

'Reason To Believe', although pretty bleak in subject matter, is in my head a real positive song. Bruce Springsteen puts into writing some depressing scenarios in the song, form love tuned sour to death. And at the end of every story he says

"still at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe"

I think after the sadness of whats happened to the people in the song, they still find some reason to believe that maybe their lover might come back, or a loved one will come back to life shows determination. Whats intriguing though, is what there believing in.

I also went back to a book I read 2 years ago based around songs from Springsteen...

Tennessee Jones looks (just like Springsteen) into the curiosity of why people believe in things. Although, Jones focuses in on one story which related to beliefs and looks at it from a child's perspective.

Whilst rummaging through the family collection of book, I found a really small bible which was given to my dad in 1971, yes, thats the same year a Neil Diamond song reached number 4 in the charts.

It even tells you what to read when dealing with situations.

As well as looking at beliefs, I was also going down the path of animating a poem and was reading a book (also found in the family collection) called 'There's an Awful Lot of Weirdos in my Neighbourhood"

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jEX9NwAACAAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks

I was hoping I'd find either a good poem or inspiration for a story which I could animate...neither happened, although the book is very entertaining!

Lastly, I watched an animation called 'Playing for Keeps' by Dyan Hayes who is a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

After watching it I read an interesting interview with Dylan on the website 'Cartoon Brew' where he talked about his inspiration for the short. One bit in particular made me think about my research and where i was going with it,

'I was also reading about a lot about various mythologies, specifically, how life, death, spirits and the afterworld are perceived by cultures in New Guinea and Haiti, the world of Vodou, and a little bit of Japanese folklore to top it off.'

After this, I started to expand my research to include mythology and legends...