Animated narratives week 2

By Rui Liu

A boy who breakdown because of the pressure from daily life, and he wants to change the situation but feels helpless, so he imagines the difficulties which give him pressure as monsters. And fight bravely with them. Finally he realized that he have to face directly to the challenges in his life. 

This work, which was based on the premise” a boy breakdown because of the pressure”, is a short silent animation which examines idea of metaphor.

By using animation, I can change the difficulties in daily life into monsters, and make them look more fearful so that the audience can get direct impression from the pictures.

For the development of the ideas I use a mind map which I see straightforward with the idea that I came out. And when I got the idea I picked up one attracting me most and make it into a complete story. Then I got into the details and here I use metaphor, such as the monsters represent as the difficulties, the high of energy bar represents the pressure level. The idea of using metaphor was came from an animated TedEX talk called The art of the metaphor. It says that “metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind” which makes me think metaphor can be a connection between feelings and understanding, people might get what you want to express by seeing the image you create even without a dialogue and the image seems not relevant with the idea directly.

By examining the idea of metaphor, I reflected that sometimes when you want to express something it is more attractive for others when using metaphor than say it directly. Not only because metaphor is more vivid, but also sometimes people just want to have their own thought and experience the happiness when find the truth.