AN Week 1

By Priyankar Ray

This is the submission for Week 1 of Animated Narratives.

Week 1

Prompt: A T-Rex unsuccessfully tries to eat ramen at a restaurant.

This work explores the idea of an outstanding character doing a dynamic action in an interactive location.

By storyboarding it, I try to explore what a short animation sequence would look like with respect to the prompt I wrote for this week’s work.

I drew inspiration from a couple of different places to do the storyboard. For the design of the Ramen store, I referenced a show called Naruto (Masashi Kishimoto 1999) for it, which has a very distinct Ramen shop. To do the storyboarding, I looked at the work of Mitch Leeuwe as he has a lot of instructional videos of how to draw digitally, something I am still very new at.

After looking at this week’s criteria, I wanted to think more in terms of animation, as I still think in terms of filmmaking, that being my background. Therefore for my story this week, I tried to think of a story that is simple, but can be accentuated by the medium of animation. As I am not an animator yet, I chose to storyboard to get the point across. The idea of a T-Rex struggling with something as simple as eating food due to it’s small hands was something I felt was amusing and therefore tried to convey that without the use of any dialogues. I also got the idea of the chopsticks from a story I heard in class during CPS, where a student cut two different pairs of chopsticks to make a new pair of itself. I took inspiration from that idea to fit into this story. I was also very impressed by the film called Wind (Robert Leonel 2013) that was shown in class as they showed simple actions with an odd setting which made the that simple action very interesting. I chose the medium as animation (storyboarding to get the idea across in this case) as it is perfect to tell stories that would not necessarily work well in a live-action setting (and also cause dinosaurs are difficult to get in this day and age!).