Animated Narratives Week 2

By Harry Hughes

A lone figure follows around three much taller figures, back and forth all day, basically ignored by them. One day the taller figures pick up the shorter figure and hold it above their shoulders, championing it. There is much celebration and shouting until it is revealed that the shorter figure was merely asleep, dreaming of this moment.

This work, which was based off the Premise "what if everyone but you was 9 foot tall", is a stop motion animation which examines themes such as conspiracy and dreams. 

By using animation, I can easily create characters that are different sizes and shapes from each other to tell an exaggerated fictional tale.

For the development of these ideas I made a mindmap and then tried some of Linda Aronson's techniques, the first of which was to simply write down as many ideas as I could in ten minutes from one of the bubbles on my map. This gave me a few options to work with and Aronson says that you should then go through them all in detail and remove any clichés. Unfortunately most of the things I came up with were indeed pretty cliché heavy.

To briefly sum this up- I had come up with a story where the main character was the only non-9 foot person in the world, who one day finds out that there may be other non-9 foot tall people, somewhere out there, hiding. I used the Aronson technique to decide on why they were all in hiding, and the best one I came up with was that "a short person coming to their world and being their saviour is a key part of their religion". Another one I liked was that the short character "spends its whole life dreaming up all these scenarios but never finds any answers", and this led me to changing the ending of the story to being a punchline where it was all in the imagination of the short character; nothing has changed, it is short for no good reason. This kind of dry, deadpan ending is exactly in line with my sense of humour.

I couldn't get the visual idea out of my head that this was all taking place in a realistic world, and the story (for obvious reasons) just didn't seem authentic enough to me in this setting, so I started drawing the characters in my notebook and that is where I'd like them to stay. Putting them on a very plain background I found it easier to let my imagination run wild. I felt as though the aesthetics were inspired by the "No God" film that we watched the in lecture of Week 3. It tells such a complex story with only two colours and a few moving lines, and I think this is extremely powerful.