As
I was looking back at the facial expressions we drew yesterday, I came up with
a character idea for my story. I’m thinking of some sort of inanimate object,
but it could have cartoon like facial features. Perhaps a cup or some other
piece of litter, or a household appliance. I like the idea of the story being
about something that couldn’t happen in real life, I think fantasy is one of
the great things about animation, you can create things that in reality, would
be impossible. As Walt Disney once said;
When
thinking of my storyline, I did some research into other animation shorts. In
particular I looked at the storylines of Pixar.
La Luna
This short shows a boy on a
small dingy boat with two men, one who looks like he could be his father and
the other his granddad. Once they’re in the middle of the sea they throw the
anchor over the side. They each try to convince the boy of the right way to
wear his hat. They pull a ladder out of the boat that goes up to the moon, and
they climb up on to in. On the moon, the boy sees that the moons shine is made
up of shining stars. They then begin to start using brushes to sweep the stars
along the surface of the moon.
A large star bigger then
the others crashes into the moon. They try to move it but it is too big. The
boy climbs up the star and when he gets to the top, taps it with a hammer. The
star explodes into lots of the smaller stars and the boy falls down with them
onto the moon surface. They continue to brush all the stars to the other side
of the moon, before going back down the ladder to their boat. When they look
up, the crescent moon shines.
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3 simple characters
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Fantasy style story
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Shows them overcoming struggle
Day & Night
In this short there are two
characters, one is Day and one is Night. When they first meet they don’t seem
to like each other. Each of the characters has things happen inside their body
that would normally happen in the day or night time. These things can express
how they are feeling at the time. When things are happening to each of them,
the other becomes jealous, and they fight. In the end they start to warm to
each other. The short ends with them relating to each other, and they swap
places.
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2 simple characters
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Complex detail inside
characters
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Characters fight then make
up
For The Birds
This short focuses on a
group of birds that land on a telephone wire, and start to argue. After the
fight a bit, a larger bird lands in the middle of them all. The smaller birds
pick on the larger one because he is different. The big bird is so heavy that
the wire comes all the way to the ground. The smaller birds slowly push the big
bird off the wire. The birds suddenly realise what will happen when the big
bird falls off the wire, but it is too late. The wire pings up into the sky and
the birds are sent flying. The small birds all fall to the ground, they have
all been plucked featherless by the speed they were sent off, and the large
bird laughs at them.
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Simple characters, 2 types of bird
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Simple setting
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Smaller bird characters are mean but get their comeuppance
I’ve
come to the conclusion that the most successful stories are always fairly
simple, and often play with humour and emotion.
The narrative is important but doesn’t necessarily have to contain any
actual spoken word, and the audio is key. It’s very important to have the right
sounds at the right time, and just in general think about each object/sound
carefully, does it need to be there?
