Final Character Design – October 2nd

Got some good feedback again, so here is the 3rd version (hopefully final!) of my character:

My final story is below the other 2 posts containing the prior versions of my character.

Revised Character Concept Render

Here’s the revision of Myaku:  Worked on making her appear shyer, more innocent and less secure in her surroundings.

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Myaku – Concept Render Drawing

Here’s Myaku:

Final Story Concept, Premise, and Structure – October 2nd

( EDITED: OCT. 2ND )

Concept/Theme:   Important messages find ways of conveying themselves.

Structure:

It is a story about a clumsy, teenage female fox who wants to express her feelings to a crush, which makes her decide to give him a love letter, chocolates and various other gifts for Valentine’s Day. She meets with an escalating array of conflicts when she tries balancing all of her gifts and making it out of the kitchen… leading to a final climax where she trips and falls, ruining her love letter and chocolates and resolution where she ends up seeing the heart of her message written in the wake of her disaster.

Paragraph Detail:

An adolescent fox named Myaku wants to express her feelings to a boy she likes named Nathan.  Today is Valentine’s Day and Myaku, an international student from Japan, is used to associating the holiday with a day that girls give gifts of chocolates to boys to express their feelings (as opposed to the opposite being the norm in the U.S.)  In Myaku’s excitement, she has created a plethora of gifts for Nathan, including a precious love letter spelling out her affection for him. 

However, Myaku is cursed by clumsiness, which when coupled with her awkward load of food and gifts, causes her great difficulty.  As she tries to successfully make it out of the kitchen with her bundle, each successive stumble and bump brings more and more things clattering to the ground or spilling. 

Myaku gets increasingly frenzied as she notices time drawing close to the beginning of the school day.  She desperately tries to keep herself from knocking over anything else and works on salvaging what’s left of her presents for Nathan.  Then, after a particularly large sneeze, she slips over some spilt liquid on the floor and sends the remaining items, along with the all-important letter, crashing to the floor.  The spills and splatters from before, coupled with an explosion of chocolate truffles, completely ruins the love letter. 

 Devastated, Myaku drops to the floor and sobs hopelessly.  She has only minutes left until she needs to leave for school and will meet Nathan and her friend begins insistantly calling for her to get ready to leave.  Quickly glancing up at a photograph of Nathan, she gains new-found resolve and rises from the floor, determined to confess her feelings to him one way or another.   

Glancing down casually at the spot she was just sitting in, Myaku is shocked when she discovers her various messes on the kitchen floor have abstractly spelt out “love Nathan” via a caramel splat in the shape of a heart and a piece of a destroyed chocolate cake which says ‘Nathan’ on it in icing.  Tilting her head in thought, she grabs her polaroid camera from the counter and snaps a picture of the message written in her clumsiness.  Grinning wildly, she takes a Sharpie marker and scrawls an “I” to the left of the heart-shaped splatter and runs off to school with the photo as proof of her intent.

—-~~~—-

A Note on How to Make Chocolate Truffles:

Step1:
Gather the ingredients.  Making truffles is very easy and you, the baker, can add to or take away from anything shown here. If you are allergic to one of these ingredients, simply replace it.

Step2:

Bring the cream cheese to room temperature, and beat in a mixing bowl with a spoon until smooth. Gradually beat in powdered sugar.

Step3:

Add three cups of chocolate chips to a saucepan on your stove top, not in the microwave. Heat chocolate chips on medium until melted.

Step4:

From stove top, take saucepan with melted chocolate to bowl with cream cheese and transfer all the melted chocolate into the bowl. With chocolate and cream cheese in same bowl, begin mixing ingredients together.

Step5:

Place this combined truffle mix in refrigerator for an hour. After an hour, remove bowl from refrigerator, and with a teaspoon remove about an inch or inch and a half worth of mixture and form into a ball. Repeat this process 6 times.

Step6:

For a gourmet looking truffle, roll each truffle ball into nuts, cocoa powder, coconut flakes or whatever baking product you like. Maybe you can roll the truffle ball into caramel!

Step7:

Prepare rolling ingredients. Hand chop sliced pecans to cut down on costs, then roll the truffles in the nuts, or sift cocoa powder into a bowl and roll a truffle ball into powder. You can also roll a truffle ball into coconut flakes.

Step8:

Place the truffles into the candy boxes with foil candy holders and candy box liners.

Candy boxes can be found at craft stores and are easy to put together. If you purchase the candy liners, once the box is made, turn the box over, place the candy liner over the bottom of the box and cut the liner to the length it will fit inside the candy box.

Step9:

Close candy box and place your homemade sticker in the center of closed candy box. Now, you can give these delicious chocolate truffles as a gift—or eat them yourself.

Assignment 1: 12 Concept Statements

1.  There’s no honor among thieves, except when faced with an impossible task.  Dustbunnies which thieve crumbs from a floor and each other must work together to keep a mop from wiping them away.

2.  Love squashes all.  A paper weight enamored with the beautiful origami surrounding him cannot seem to get close enough to his desire without crushing it flat.

3.  New life fights for its place in the world.  A tea light’s flame fights for existance against an open window carrying in a wicked breeze.

4.  You can’t dance if you want to, and leave your friends behind.  A laptop battery grooves to the music coming from the speakers, only to keep jerking out the adapter and killing the tunes.

5.  You are my sunshine…  A small cat figurine serving as a waving door-greeter and delighting in making people happy suddenly can’t move her arm anymore.

6.  Checkmate – You aren’t always in the position you think you place yourself in.  A pawn knocked off a chessboard discovers the grim face of war and his true purpose.

7.  Things that seem the best for everyone are often the worst for all.  An eccentric baker alters a cake recipe for a wedding in order to yield a larger product but can’t seem to get it out of the oven once it’s risen. 

8.  When passion rules logic, no one can move forward.  A female fox believes in a rumor that the trees are to blame for fires in the woods, thinking to make her family safe by placing them out into the open grasslands.

9.  Loneliness is measured by desperation.  A parrot locked in a cage resorts to speaking freely to his captors in order to keep his sanity.

10.  That which we hold highest often becomes that which holds us back.  A quiet and withdrawn poet struggles not to narrate his own life and create a self-fulfilling prophecy of tedium.

11.  Common sense trumps knowledge.  An engineer labors and succeeds in creating a time machine but forgets to add a way to step inside of his invention. 

12.  Unjust persecution marries misery to guilt.  A black sheep struggles to come to term with the stereotypes surrounding his identity.