Character Design

For this project I have decided to revisit the idea of turning some of the experiences my extended family and I have with my younger brother Matthew. Recently, I’ve seen a surge in stories about people on the spectrum. There is even a new Netflix series out called Atypical, which follows the story of a relatively high functioning boy in his family/dating life in America. Other classic autism stories include feature films ‘Rain Man’, ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,’ and a documentary about Temple Grandin. However, I haven’t seen a whole lot of stories about people who are lower functioning/with severely limited language, which is the case for my brother.

There is a central metaphor that has been sitting in my head for a while, but right now it exists best as words, which is deeply ironic. But too, I can only know my brother’s phobias through my own experience.

Growing up, my brother had/has a lot of different routines that had to happen otherwise it would be a relative ‘end of the world’. Of course, this looked ridiculous to most people from the outside, but to him, when one of the routines was broken, it seemed to be an equivalent of breaking the laws of physics. Particularly, because I hypothesized that he had a slightly different understanding of object permanence than what is neurotypical. In a way, doing to routines was a way to make sure there wasn’t a ‘Butterfly Effect’ of change. Every time a routine was revisited, it re-established a known as well as a sense of reality. However, I want to visually convey such stakes and the stakes for relative fears more broadly.

Originally, the central metaphor was that there was a boy who lived his daily life, but all of his objects at home were actually balloons. Every day, he would have to return home to make sure all of the balloons were tied down, but no one could understand why he was so anxious about the fact. No one else understood that all of his objects were balloons. That was as far as I got.

To push the idea I created a memory-based mind map of my experiences with my brother, but I hope to get some feedback/additional information from my parents as well as the other people who know him.

Additionally, I have also started to work on some character design for this boy, keeping in mind who my target audience will be. At this juncture, the target audience is children ages 6-8 who may just be encountering people with these ‘different laws of physics’ for the first time, as this is an age when kids are entering compulsory school, at least in the US. However, the story and the metaphor may change. Or they may become many stories for many different audiences.