World Building: Designing Characters and World They Live In

Course Description

Summary

Every fictional universe has its own history, culture, geography, and ecology that act as a backdrop to the narratives that inhabit it.  This course will investigate the relationship between such a fantastical place and its characters – with a particular emphasis on the philosophy and symbology of the characters and their clothes.

This class will be both an exploration of existing media (film and television, video games, cartoons and comic strips, and other narrative based art forms) and a space to design one's own world.

Students will generate a journal/sketchbook of ideas to culminate in a paper project presentation. They will build the logic and lore for a fully fleshed out world with an emphasis on character, costume and context.

Students are welcome to world-build for a graphic novel, prep for an animation, production design for a movie, play/performance, any other medium they wish to work toward or just a paper project exploring a fantasy world of their creation. As the emphasis of the class is on refining visual storytelling- text based work is welcome but will need to be grounded in visualizing the world in drawings or images.
 

Note: This is a conceptual design and not a costume construction class