Animation Characters & Narrative
Animation Characters & Narrative
I started two stories at this class and I'm planning to work on their development during the spring semester..jpg)
My logline:
Violence begets violence and someone has to end the cycle.
My storyline:
A boy is bullied as a child. One day he notices a poster of the goddess of death and war, and begins to worship her and start a war. One of the victims of this war kills the main instigator of all disasters.
My synopsis:
1. A boy runs away from bullies who try to chase him. When they catch up with him, they beat him up. He lies on the ground and notices a poster that hangs on the wall behind him.
The girl from the poster turns out to be the goddess of death and war, and she takes the boy's mind because he thinks she can give him love and acceptance.
2. The boy grew up and began to profess death and violence. With his followers he started a war.
3 The Goddess of War flies over a peacefully sleeping city and turns into an aeroplane that drops bombs on the city. Everything is thrown into chaos.
4. A mother and her boy run from the bombs in the city, which is covered with defences. A bomb explodes behind them and the boy's mother is killed. The boy looks at his mother in confusion. The goddess of war picks up the boy and carries him away. As she carries him away, he looks over her shoulder and sees soldiers approaching his mother's dead body. Their faces turn into those of zombies in the boy's eyes, which are covered on all sides by tongues of flame.
5. The goddess brings the boy to the man who started the war (the boy who was bullied as a child). The boy, whose mum has died, sees the man who caused his mum's death and wants revenge.
The goddess of war gives the boy a knife and he kills the man who caused him so much pain.
The boy feels the pain of his deed and cries, and the goddess of war disappears. This disappearance is also symbolically shown through a shot where a poster of her falls from the wall on which it was hanging.
We see a shot of the boy growing up and coming to the cemetery where all those who died during the war are buried and his mum is there too. The cemetery shot is very long and at the end the whole cemetery is covered in blood.
Ending.
I think it's impossible to create good stories without travelling and learning about the world around you. In January this year, my classmates and I went on an excursion to the town of Edessa to see a local attraction - waterfalls. I finished editing the vlog only in April, as this activity takes up a lot of my time. I apologise in advance for the use of some swear words in the video.
Music that inspired me while I was thinking about these stories.
The first story is about war and propaganda, and that's why I was inspired by those songs:
Watercolor preproduction
At first I decided to make the whole animatic with watercolour, but then I realized that to draw some transitions of frames will be too long and so I made only part of the story on paper. The rest of the story I plan to do on a graphics tablet.Development of a second animatic
I wanted to do a full animation, but since I chose two themes, focusing on one thing didn't work out and I had to sacrifice some work to get at least one animatic ready on time.
I created a small book showing how a depressed person feels, I can't say that this is how every person suffering from this illness feels, but this is how I feel.
Initially, the storyboard had a sad ending, the girl throws herself out of the window of a tall building, but I decided to leave the ending open, I think that it will be more correct and the viewer will be able to interpret the ending the way they want.
The final version of my little animation.
Continuation of the second animation.
Photo of watercolour work.
I did all the illustrations with watercolours, photographed them and uploaded them to video processing software. The process of drawing took a week of work, 4-5 hours a day. I spent a lot of time waiting for the drawing to dry, which was definitely annoying.
I only showed generalised shapes and didn't sketch details to save time.
The drawings are made in sketchbook of format A4, sometimes I drew on a full spread, that made the size of a sheet more, that is the size of big compositions was A3.
When I started painting the watercolour frames of the animation, my story wasn't finished yet, causing plot holes. I first asked my classmate Alex for advice because he is a good scriptwriter and after discussing ideas with him, I decided that I wanted to hear the opinion of my teacher, Miss Aspasia.
Miss Aspasia suggested many different story ideas, but we agreed that the story of a boy who was bullied as a child and a boy who lost his mother to the bombing of the city should be combined.
At first, Miss Aspasia and I decided that a negative ending to the story would be appropriate, but it could be changed, which I did.
Already in the process of drawing the animation frames on the graphics tablet, I realised that I wanted to make the ending ‘sweet and sour’.
I decided that a little boy who lost his mother and killed a dictator to avenge the death of a loved one would feel that violence would not dull the pain, and he would feel sad that he had taken a man's life.
At this point the war in this world is rolled up and the goddess of war disappears. Only the endless crosses on the graves of the dead remain.
But since the end of this story is not supposed to be one hundred per cent positive, in the final shots the entire cemetery is flooded with blood, as a symbol of the repeated violence that has no end.
One more draft.
The videos I animated for the project.
Films that have inspired me.
Barefoot Gen
I wanted to create something that people would only be willing to watch once. A film that would make people disgusted by any kind of violence. A film that would be heavy in content - that was my goal.
I tried to convey horror and hopelessness, I wanted to show that all violence has a beginning. People are not born villains, they become them after experiencing something traumatic and leaving a scar in the human soul.
My animation does not have a good ending, but rather an imaginary mirage of a happy ending, drenched in grief and blood, regrets, pangs of conscience and memories that I want to erase.
I realise that this kind of dystopian and gloomy animation, the choice of themes for my projects, is due to my psychological state - depression, and how it has changed my outlook to a more pessimistic side.
Honestly, when I did the scene where the blood floods the graveyard, it reminded me of the scene in the film The Shining where a huge torrent of blood pours out of the lift.
In that film, the hotel was built on a sacred site for the local Native Americans, so it's not surprising that horrors were happening in a place where something important to humans was destroyed. It is very important to respect and love the people and nature around us, by invading another person's personal space, bullying them, we provoke the world around us to reciprocate violence, which can be directed at the offender or other weaker people who cannot stand up for themselves.
Animatic bible:
My presentation:
My presentation:
Final version of animatic
The sheer number of crosses in the cemetery is of course to create a sense of infinity of victims of aggression, which was shown in my animation.
I know, these black crosses are tiring, but please wait for the continuation in the animation, I think it came out quite spectacular and unexpected for the end of such a story. I would also like to warn you that the video has a rather slow pace, and the piece of music I have chosen may be hard to listen to for it has rather harsh sounds.
After I completed my animatic, I sent it to my teacher and she gave her comments. I decided not to change anything in my work, but I think it is necessary to point out in the blog what my teacher was. I will try to take all these points into account in my next works:
1) in 2:51 --> it would be helpful to have an extra frame showing the
instance in which the godess is snatching the child.
Yeah, maybe we should take a little more footage to explain what's going on.
2) just a quick idea, when the child stabs the dictator, it would be
interesting to have a close-up shot with the wound, because it is like
the symbol of his authoritarian regime (red-blood on black-his dress).
I think this is a great idea and if I had a little more time left before the project was due, I would add this shot to the animatic.
3) I would like to ask about the length of the final shot with the
cemetery.
I agree that almost two minutes for a graveyard video is a lot, but I wanted to evoke a sense of the timelessness of the victims of the violence that happened in the animatic.
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