Visualising the World 1 - The Village

The characters in Caleb's Trial come from a fictional island, somewhere in Northern Europe. It is a fairly small island, about a thousand square kilometres in size. It is set roughly around mid to late 1600's, and has been colonised for about 120 years. We picked this place and time largely because of some of the influences we had. We love the music video to Sigur Rós' Glósóli, and we wanted to create a style of fashion that was similar to that worn by the children in this video. And quite frankly, we just like old stuff like pocket watches.

We looked at some pictures of fashion from around that time frame and place, as well as clothing from other eras (including modern day) that we just thought looked interesting. We incorporated feathers into all the clothing designs as an element that unifies and distinguishes the fashion style. We thought that, like New Zealand, the native animals of the island would be mostly birds, so over the decades birds became a prominent aspect in the culture of the settlers.

There are about a thousand people living on the island, most of whom live in a coastal village. Here the island is run by a governor chosen by blood relation to the royal family which rules whatever motherland they originate from (perhaps Iceland or Norway). It is also here where the island's economy is centered; hunters, fishermen and farmers sell their goods here, seamstress' make clothing (largely from imported materials), there is a doctor's office, educational facilities such as a library, and tradesmen deal with ships that come in from other countries. The main characters in the story are from this village.

Dane



Here are a few rough concepts that we drew to try to nail down a style of fashion before we got into designing the main characters -

Writing the Story 1 - The Start of the Series

At the start of 2007, Dane and I spent a day writing as many rough concepts for a Rhubarb Zoo webseries as we could. The idea to create an ongoing, regularly updated series came about when my dad asked if we had planned to have any regular content on the site. Our plan had been to go into hiding for three years or so to make a short film, but we liked his idea so we decided to do both. In true Ruzu fashion the series, which was originally meant to be simple and short, quickly spiraled out of control and became the single focus of our endeavours for the next several years.

These were the two final concepts that were settled on as a starting point –

• A race of people that live underwater uproot themselves and board giant airships to dwell above the ocean at the behest of a megalomaniac leader.

• In an amish-type society, every person is taken away to have a sense removed every tenth year of their life. The story picks up after the protagonist is 20 and is set to be taken away again.

We decided to spend a week on each, fleshing out characters and creating a story structure. After the two weeks we would decide which we liked more.

The first week went by in a flash – we had settled on a rough story and had even started the character concepts. It was fairly film-noir – had a love interest, lots of cool imagery, and a bizarre twist which explained why people had become depressed and suicidal (because their source of love was in the ocean). We had a lot of fun with it, and it felt strange uprooting ourselves to work on concept number 2.

After the second week we sat down and decided which path to take. The decision was, in a way, life defining. The outcome would determine what the next big chunk of our lives would be like – and impact on where we would go after that. After a moment of uneasiness we discovered that we both far preferred the ‘sense’ concept we had just worked on – we had introduced another idea to the original concept that seemed to make the possibilities we had with the story endless (for reasons we can’t tell you).

So we got to work on writing it.

J

































Early concept art for 'Fin', protaganist of the first story idea

Caleb's Trial Development Diary - An Introduction

Sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.

It's pretty easy to take your senses for granted. But what if one was ripped from you without a reasonable explanation? What if your friends and family started to lose theirs? What if every ten years of your life, you lost another?

This is the basis of our online 'webseries', and is the world that a young man named Caleb is thrust into and is forced to confront.

It's still a year or so before we release the first episode of the series - but if you're at all interested in the mechanics behind the creation of the beast we'd love for you to stick around! It's great to get feedback and thoughts from other animation and film fans, and as we think that what we're attempting is something that really hasn't been done before we're sure you'll get a lot out of being involved!

These are the stages of pre-production that we'll be going through before the first episode is released (notice we're keeping a tab on our progress on the right hand side of the page) -

• Story draft
• Complete Script
• Visual Concepts
• Music Concepts
• Dialogue Recording

This means that by the end of preproduction we should have the story complete, all of the dialogue recorded, and the look, sound and feel of the series nailed down. From that point on we can simply knuckle down and animate our little hearts out to get an episode done once a month.

But before we get to that point there's a tonne of work to be done! At the moment we're on the second draft of the story - tweaking, changing and fully replacing parts of the story that we weren't happy with after reviewing the original draft that we completed a year ago. After the second draft is complete we'll show a few close friends (mostly voice actors that will be involved with the project), and see what they think before writing a full script that takes their ideas into consideration.

So for now, expect written thoughts on our experiences with bringing the world to life in the story phase of the project. The visual design phase is not too far in the future though, so there should be plenty to interest you over the next few months!

Jeremy and Dane