Ian Buckley Animation and Motion Design LSAD: December 2013

After dissecting the brief, I planned how to approach the project, marking out mile stones and my approach.

So I looked at ;synonyms, quotes, movie, words associated with Christmas. I then drew up a mind map for Christmas.

I searched the internet for the origin of Christmas. Resulting in investigation into Pagan religions.

Among the theories of the origin of Christmas I found John Rush's idea that much of the Christmas tradition comes from the old shamanic people of Siberia.
The amanita muscaria mushroom, is said to be the main inspiration for Santa's colour, why we hang decorations on Christmas trees, why Santa comes down the chimney, why Rudolf's nose maybe red and also why we put presents around the base of a tree. If you wan to learn more follow this link ( http://www.livescience.com/25731-magic-mushrooms-santa-claus.html )

I began playing around with how to represent this information within an animation by storyboarding.

I felt that mushrooms, reminded me of flying saucers so decided to make them fly.

As elfs are Christmassy and are often depicted to live within mushrooms I decided to add an elf that could pilot the mushroom space ship. This also reminded me of talks by Terence McKenna in which he discus's the machine elf's which he had made contact with through the use of psychedelics. The flying mushroom ships would chase after a sledders until they caught up and latched themselves onto the sledders head morphing him into Santa Clause.

While researching folklore in regards to mushrooms I came across the myths of Fairy rings (also known as Elf circles.) Which are mushrooms that grow in a circle. Associated with being a portal to another dimension as well as making an intruder fall victims to the illusions of the mystic beings.

With this in mind I knew I could now use a fairy ring to transform a man into Santa.