Read the previous post - designs and ideas - here.

The idea behind the city was to have a representation of the ‘city’ living inside Jeff’s head. They are futuristic. They are Lego people. They sing to a very annoyingly cute song.

So what to put into this city?

To begin with, I just wanted to come up with part of the design, which I could then pitch to Tom to see if he liked it or not. If he did, I would continue to design the city with little to no input from him (more because of time constraints; I knew what he’d like, and anything I was unsure of, I’d ask him about).

Initially I was going to have ‘four’ boxes, each one revealing a different part of the city at a different time in the song. The boxes however, would be attached to a single ‘base plate’ to allow easy transport. They would have a lid each. This idea quickly changed as I either forgot about the four lids during the build, or I simply calculated that the puppeteers wouldn’t have much time to remove each lid (or I simply calculated that there weren’t enough hands to remove each one).

So I divided the city into four sections; Tom having told me there would be four verses (one for each area of the city), including a loving couple, and a chorus. The chorus was to have the rotating people.

What to put in a city? The obvious: a very urban centre with lots of buildings. The couple made another section easy to create; a house with two people in it. The third section was easily decided; with rotating people, what better place for them to collect but in a park. And the last was my own personal twist.

Since the ‘city’ in Jeff’s head was mining his brain for power, I decided to make the last area of the city a little brain mine. This ended up working very well (since I only got the lyrics for the song much later), as there was a lot of mention about the mines in the song.

Now I had four city areas to design. Which one to do first?

Read the next post - the ‘box’ - here.