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