Tales of the City Ideas

Tales of the City is a fairly open brief, without a lot of specifications, other than the fact that visual storytelling is a big part of it. Both single and sequential images are fine for submission, so it's up to me how much I want to produce for this. Though it would be nice to have a whole collection of images, I need to think about the time I have to do this in. The competition itself doesn't finish until June 1st, but our submission deadline is a lot earlier than that, so I will need to be careful. Multiple images sounds very fun though, so I'm tempted to go with something like that.

An idea I like is using the same illustration, but changed gradually with each iteration to show maybe a slow/subtle aging of the city, or showing some kind of change. This could further be reflected by any people in the image - they could age along with the city, giving us a more exact marker of the time gone by. It would be nice to make this slightly animated in Rebecca Mock style, but I definitely don't have time to do that.

Suggestions on the briefing page mention "lost cities, mythical cities, cities of the future", so my idea doesn't even have to be all that realistic. Those sorts of cities might be way more fun to design, but telling a story with them could be harder - obviously cities of the future could show progression of a city to the point where it is futuristic, but I feel like that could be a common idea. What story could I tell with a more mythical or fantasy sort of city? I don't want to let myself get carried away with ideas that would inevitably mean designing and adding multiple characters, since that's the direction I usually go for most briefs. It will be nice if I can focus much more on environments for this one, so preferably no more than one significant character in each.

There could always be progressions through a city - starting perhaps at a more basic, lower class part of a city towards a more upper class society, or industrial to residential. This might give me too much work involving designing a whole city - I'm more likely to go overboard with that and spend all of my time with ideas rather than actually making any finished products, although it does sound fun. It will probably be easier to decide on some ideas after doing a bit more research.