17 Sept 2011

Introduction to Self Initiated Project's Idea; Native Americans' legend: Wolves Within


With the start of 3rd year in CG Arts and Animation, starts one of the two most ambitious creative projects. I’ll be working together with Leo Tsang on it. Blog of our project (yet under construction), Wolves Within, can be found here.



Wolves Within

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." He continued, "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed..."

It is a legend told by a Cherokee tribe.Having the basic plot and idea where all is heading (namely, opportunity to develop two wolf characters, environments representing inner space and possibly, if intended, set it all up for future to turn it into an animated short), we also get clues for sources of reference.


As said before, it is a legend told by Cherokee. They refer to themselves as Tsalagi which means "Principal People." It is one of the Better known Indian tribes and also one of the” 5 civilized tribes” because they had assimilated numerous cultural and technological practices of European Americans. However, sources have indicated that Indian tribes don’t have a distinctive examples of art from each other (at least it is fairly impossible to make such distinctions because of data loss ect.) , so it is considered that what is relevant to Cherokee art is also relevant to all Native American art. Therefore we too reference Native American art in general to further inspire our style.

The project is only yet taking shape and many decisions are waiting to be maid, therefore our focus at the moment is simply familiarize with wolves shapes, anatomy and already created representations.



Initial anatomy and structure studies:





So to get acquainted with "what's out there" I also gathered a sheet of wolves design. Quite honestly, none of the images seem to be similar to what we are aiming for our designs.



Finally, project would build on clear classification of virtues and vice

3 comments:

  1. Sounds like an exciting projet :). Reminds me very much of a story I read once about horses instead, called Seahorses. There were two horses one blue and one gray. The blue was kind and bought good weather etc where as the gray one bought storms and liked to wreck ships etc :)

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  2. haha :D I can't wait myself to see how it will turn out (fingers crossed)

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