Here's something new

I think I have an idea for my thesis. While still kind of rough, it has the elements of something I think I'd thoroughly enjoy working on for the next year and a half.

     Somewhere in ancient Greece, the people in a small town start their day. The farmers tend their fields with their mules, people go to the river and wash their clothes, etc. Everything seems low tech and normal for the time period. We then see an older man run out of his shack carrying a box. He's an inventor, and today he will show his greatest creation to the best and brightest minds and in the land.
 
At a gathering in the city, the inventor presents before a crowd his lifes work; the aeolipile. Everyone goes crazy, seeing the worlds first steam engine. The applications could be endless. As everyone becomes more animated, one person isnt so thrilled. As he grips his own box and takes a look inside, we see he has created the SAME EXACT thing. He was beaten to the punch, and now he can't get the credit for it. He leaves in disgust as the crowd celebrates with their man of the hour.
   
We then fast forward to a few years later. The same town we saw at the beginning has everyone start their day, however this time we see everything is done with crazy machines that are all steam and gear powered. The farmers use (sorta) tractors to plow their fields, everyones clothes get put through some kind of crazy steam press to get cleaned, and people can ride chariots dragged by mechanical horses. The main inventor takes a long look over everything and feels extremely satisfied with how everything has turned out. Everything seems to be going well, but meanwhile, in the other scientist is in his lab, throwing out schematics and partially constructed experiments. He collapses in his seat, frustrated and defeated. Just then, he get's a brief glimpse of something in the back. He walks over and finds that it's a box. He opens it up and takes out his old aeolipile. He then begins to rapidly make sketches for a new machine using his steam ball as the power source.

At this point, I don't have much of an idea on how we transition to this part, but one day the bad inventor comes to the town in his newest creation; a mechanical dragon that he can drive. Here I wanted to have a big battle scene where the dragon scorthes and destroys the city, and soliders come in with their new war machines as well, but they aren't as effective as they hope.  Eventually, the good inventor see's that the dragon has steam exhaust holes where the nostrils are, and manages to cram log in one, which causes immense build up inside the engine and destroys the machine. As far as falling action goes, I don't really have that settled either.


Anyway, this is what I think I'm going to stick with for my final project. It's still a bit in the rough stages, but I've got visuals in my mind of what I want things to look like, and the world building aspect really intrigues me. I also liked playing with the idea of the power of invention and how ideas can be used for different gains. I got the idea for this project when I was reading this article about a scientist named Hero of Alexandria. It nicely condenses a lot of information about what he invented or came up with but never created physically. What fascinated me most, however, is that he came up with things that I think most people would assume were to sophisticated for their time. I wondered what would have happened in history had his work not be seen as merely novelty by the people of the day. I guess we'll never know for sure, but speculation and alternate history are always fun. I mean, who doesn't want to see steampunk antiquity?

A few Ideas (and a wall of text)

Ugh, I hate having to pitch ideas. They never sounds as good as they do in my head. But I guess I have to share some of potential project premises, so here we go.


     (1) A high school kid suffers from chronic nightmares every time he goes to sleep. One day he's in his psych class and begins to doze off after having a night where he refused to sleep at all in order to avoid another bad dream. As his teacher yammers on the kid sees the teacher write the words "lucid dreaming" on the board. Our protagonist then picks up his book and reads through it until he finds it defined in the text. He learns about how when one is fully "lucid" they can control their dreams. He then relizes this is his best bet for conquering his nightmares.
     Later that day he goes home and looks up how to actually attain lucidity, and learns that you need to do things like find symbols you can recognize in your dreams and so on (I really don't want to go into too much detail here, but I'll touch on it in the final project and you can look it up yourself if you want). Basically, this results in him watching cheesy action movies and playing video games as a sort of training. After what I assume I'll cover in a montage, he'll go to sleep and as the monsters that haunt his dreams come out again for another night or torment, he pulls a fast one and becomes some kind of hyper violent badass and decimates everything using the imagery he pulled from the real world (i.e. he uses all kinds of weapons and wire-fu and other ridiculous things). It's cheesy and juvenile, but cathartic and fun.
     I like this one because I think it will give me a chance to play around with humor and action, and since it's animated I can be as free as I want to to exaggerate things and just have fun with it.


(2) Another idea I had revolved around a famous explorer who goes on all kinds of fantastic adventures (think Indiana Jones or Edgar Rice Burrows kind of journeys), but really hates doing so. He'll be asked to find an artifact of some kind and while his sidekick ( I have no idea what to do for this character, I just know the protagonist is going to need a foil of some kind). Past this I really don't have much else thought out. I remember Joe made a comment about my sound edit project  and he mentioned how he thought it was funny the character I had was complaining the whole time even though he was in an exotic, surreal locale. I thought that was a funny observation and decided to expand on that idea a bit more. I guess it would, in a way, be his idea? Yet it was inspired by something I made, so it's still my original idea? Meh, whatever.

(3) I don't have much of an idea here, but doing a project using only non-human characters interests me a lot. Maybe using animals or abstract representations of living things? I'm not sure. Or perhaps doing a project influenced by early human cave paintings? I'm fascinated by that kind of primal art style, but I also kind of feel like Len Lye has already treaded those waters. I'll think more about this later. It's a nice tangent, but I don't have anything concrete enough to work with here just yet.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog for my thesis project. As time goes on I will be updating with posts on my progress. I'll also try and make this look a bit nicer too.