Gruffleglenn and its History

I may have mentioned at some time that this film started off inside a single room. There was no exterior. At some point along the line we decided to include a window and a few shots outside the window in order to make the film seem bigger. Outside the window was to look something like this.

Outside Als Window

Then, later on we decided to have a shot of the city, that's purpose was to show the passage of time and act as a bit of an establishing shot. Which was going to look a bit like this.

Original concept for the City of Gruffleglenn

And after a bit of revision, like this.

Updated concept for the City of Overhang

Next, we wanted to show some of the town and surrounding land. Just to make this feel a bit like a living breathing town so we decided on having a map of the kingdom in there at some point. This is not the original map, it went through a couple of revisions by its self, but this is pretty well a final one.

Map of the Kingdom of Overhang

Then it was someones smart idea to actually start on the map, zoom into the city and then into Als window.

This was a bit of an effort, but we ended up doing it nonetheless (although it's not quite finished yet). So we basically start on the map, push into Gruffleglenn, at some point going through a layer of clouds and emerging onto the farmland in the outskirts of town, then into the city itself to witness the sunrise over the ocean. Very epic and dramatic.

Journey through the clouds

The Farmland sans lighting or clouds

Then we wanted to show a bit more of the city (and also reuse the original outside the window bit because we kind of liked it), so we have a couple of shots that show different areas of the city also. Like the Dirty Carpets Inn, the markets and hightown, where Al lives. (this is the heavily WIP section)

The Dirty Carpets Inn

The Market

Gruffleglenn Hightown

And that is how the city of Gruffleglenn came to be. The official story taken from local lore actually goes something like:

McGruffle, the caber toss champion from Othercity gets lost on the way to a tournament and stumbles upon the most beautiful bay he has ever seen. Hypnotized from its beauty and approaching death from starvation, he curses the gods, who cause an avalanche, destroying the bay, leaving only nasty cliff faces. Many years later, Duke Yung I is passing though and decides to set up camp for the night. He never left and Gruffleglenn just sort of grew from there. As for McGruffle, many say that the deathly skinny hermit that can be seen on occasion bears a striking resemblance, and is rather good at caber tossing.