Animated Narratives Week 4

By Harry Hughes

This week I started developing an animated film and made a short treatment and some character drawings for a film about a porcupine named Spike, from the premise "a porcupine wants to make friends with a fluffy bunny".

From Christopher Vogler's article on the predominant Archetypes in stories I learnt about a few types of characters I hadn't much considered recently, including Shadows and Threshold Guardians and I wanted to include some of them in my story. To do this, I took the idea of the porcupine and the bunny and wanted to complicate matters- so early on I decided to make the porcupine a Trickster, who dressed up as a bunny to lure in other bunnies. I then also wanted the porcupine to not be the main villain, merely a guardian to the real villain, the bulldog.

The story quickly became complicated and I used Linda Aronson's techniques for developing ideas like writing ideas down without any judgement for a certain amount of time. Pretty soon I had a story, which I attempted to lay out into a three act structure (though I'm not sure if this is a traditional three-act structure). 

This is a work for animation because it features talking animals- I couldn't help but think of Chicken Run (2000)- and I thought it would be the perfect way for me to develop my skills in 2D animating in Blender. I spent most of my time on the Porcupine, and with some difficulty I was able to get it to move and to wink, and then exported it out of Blender. The video linked above is me playing around with some old footage of mine to see what new ideas might come up from throwing random footage together. 

I think this project is pretty much in line with the rest of my practice and I can finally see the crude 2D work I'm making fit in with my crude, chaotic video style.