Brainstorming Ideas

Today I spent some time brainstorming around the concept of the word 'journey'; the word which will be the 'genesis point' for the piece I create at the end of this module.

I began my brainstorming by simply trying to sit down and quickly sketch my immediate idea of what 'journey' meant to me:

A quick sketch to get down my immediate thoughts on the word 'journey'

My immediate thought on the word journey was that life in itself is a journey as we develop from one state of life to another, e.g. baby to toddler. I had thought it was a pretty good way of looking at the word 'journey' until I stopped drawing and looked at it; at which point it just looked morbid and cliched. At this point I found myself questioning what a journey really is, so I created a spider-diagram to help further my understanding of the word:

A thought cloud based around the word 'Journey'

I began by looking up the dictionary definition of 'journey': 'an act of travelling from one place to another'. I then looked at how the meaning of the word could be expanded upon by looking up some synonyms. Many of the synonyms were just different ways of travelling such as 'cruise' or 'fly', however some words really caught my interest as I might not otherwise have come up with them; such as 'pilgrimage' or 'safari' - less vanilla words that spur the imagination help bring strong imagery to mind.

After I had gained a better idea of what the word journey means and looked into words associated with it, I had a look at some news headlines to see if any stories could be described as a journey in some way. I was surprised to find that almost all the headlines I saw could have been described as a journey in some way (come to think about it, aren't all stories we tell about a character's journey?). One headline featured 'surfing dogs' - this one really stuck me, as in just two words there's a method of travel - the literal part of the journey - as well as a statement that immediately makes you think about the back story and the journey that must have happened in order for the dogs to end up surfing; whether this is a literal or metaphorical.

I've definitely improved my understanding of the word 'journey' through these exercises and the spider diagram should come in very handy when I come to the next stage of development: producing mood-boards.