532- World Building Assignment- First Step
So these past two weeks I've been thinking about what excited me as a child. Mainly, magical beasts and fantastical archiecturally impossible castles. I picked up a great Beastiary by Borges and a best of MC Escher book- which both played a role in the creation of the movie Labyrinth. Everything came flooding back- fond memories of Basilisks and Mandrigoras as well as David Bowie in glamtastic tights.
I'll cut to the chase now, when I was a kid- I desperately wanted to visit these worlds. I would check out the same 5 castle books week after week in the summer, and imagine myself roaming their halls and questing with valiant heroes. And I've decided, I wanted to go back.
I envision my time in my world as a travel log much like Gulliver's Travels- where I visit several enchanted lands, where I will be sending letters back from. Just like Gulliver, I will act as a cartographer and armchair anthropologist.
Of course, every mystical realm needs a rabbit hole to enter from. The world has been thorougly explored and only the absurd can satisfy my reasons for escaping the regular absurdity of everyday life.
My point of entry to my first land, is the Los Angeles river which runs a block away from my house. Follow it north long enough, and you'll end up in Valencia. Whenever my family drove up to Magic Mountain in Valencia, we would pass this long aqueduct that would wind into the hills. I always wanted to a) slide down the aqueduct and b) crawl inside a giant tube on the top of the mountain.
I imagine if I did so now, I'd end up in the first of my lands. With water being an important resource in this town, I could easily see how its heavily guarded passageways could also be a heavily guarded entrance to unknown places. Why not? If a door in a random office hallway lead to John Malkovich's head- then a strange aqueduct can lead vertiably anywhere.
My unamed realm is a large valley. One that the San Joachim Valley would look like without water syphoned from outside sources. Before the land was sequestered off for farming, it would undergo extremem seasonal changes. From a desert in the summer to a marshy swamp like land in the winter and spring. Aquatic Animals and fish would bury themselves in the ground, and hibernate throughout the summer and fall only to appear at first flooding in the spring time.
In this valley roam large Ostrich like creatures- 20 meters high. On their backs people live in tents. During their day, the people come down from the creatures back and tend to daily life. At night they climb back on, and sleep soundly as the giant birds pasture.
I've drawn a few mock-ups which I will post tommorow- my camera battery is dead.