To start I began brainstorming everything about christmas
I then decided that from everything I had brainstormed that my personal preference, and where I really wanted to delve much deeper was in the world of gift giving at christmas. I chose this because it is an integral part of pretty much everybody's holiday season and there is a lot more to look at regarding this subject. So, I took this notion and looked at it a bit deeper gathering the main points surrounding this.
I was then struck with the idea of a child at Christmas. what led me to this notion was the fact that a lot of gift giving at christmas time really focuses around the giving of gifts to children and just children in general. What I really liked about this subject was that children tend to have a wonderful sense of over exaggeration and this particularly comes out around the festive period.
This notion reminded me heavily of the poem 'A christmas childhood' by Patrick Kavanagh:
My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.
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I continued looking at this and researching it further meeting a few interesting things. The best link I got from this was the connection between a child's imagination and a snow globe. Snow globes are regarded by many to have a symbolic meaning as they can be a symbol of a child's imagination and a world we all, particularly children want to be part of.
I then researched further in to snow globes and came up with the idea of trying to convey a child's imagination inside one of these snow globes.
Now I had to decide what I wanted to put in there. I chose buildings as a starting point because a lot of snow globes feature some sort of house or city.
I then looked at some of the most common and popular kids toys at the moment. some of them included dolls, robot-like figures, lego, furbies. I decided i wanted to incorporate some of these in to the city scape in different ways.
I then storyboarded my final idea:
