AN Week 3

This is the Week 3 submission for Animated Narratives.

Week 3

Prompt: …and she devoured every last one of them. – (Nick)

The clock hits midnight. The door opens ever so slowly and the head of a small girl emerges as she checks whether the corridor is empty. She looks back to check the time again. It’s 12:06AM. She slowly makes her way out of her room and into the corridor, tip toeing all the way through.

As she walks past her parent’s room, she can hear her father snore. She rolls her eyes, shakes her head slightly and wonders how her mother sleeps through it. She reaches the staircase and sighs, knowing this will be the next hurdle. As she looks down at the staircase, it grows in size dramatically. She slowly makes her way down the staircase, stopping and wincing every time it creaks. The walls creep in more and more every time there is a creak. The moment she reaches the bottom of the staircase, she walks towards the kitchen. Suddenly their dog playfully comes to her and barks at her thinking she wants to play. She shushes him freaking out and in panic. Then she stops to see if it woke her parents up. She waits for a while straining her ears to see if she can hear anything. But she could hear nothing but the muffled sound of her father snoring upstairs.

She sighs releaved, and then excitedly tip toes into the kitchen and climbs onto the kitchen counter, almost knocking over a bottle. Somehow managing to save the bottle acrobatically, she carefully stands up on the counter and carefully places the bottle down safely. She then opens the cupboard on top and looks inside as she stands stretched up on her toes. Finally noticing the jar of cookies hidden behind other things, she smiles and carefully takes it out. She jumps down with the jar and then sits down on the floor with her back on the counter. She struggles a little, but then opens the jar, filled with excitement and immediately gives one of the cookies to her dog, so that he doesn’t bark.

Smiling from ear to ear, having completed her mission of getting to the cookies, she devours every last one of them.

This work examines how a story can be created or constructed by reverse engineering it through the last sentence of said story.

Using the medium of animation this story can be told more imaginatively. As every time the main character feels she is about to fail, it can be shown in a more exaggerated manner than it would work in live action. The fact that it has no dialogues also serves better for animation in my opinion. However, having said that, a shorter version of this could also work for product advertisement in live action as well (the cookie).

For this week, I actually did not reference anything specifically. After choosing the prompt, having a group discussion in class (which resulted in a different story with the same prompt), and keeping in mind the various animated shorts I have seen over the years, I wanted to write something that would once again tell a story without any dialogues, but would give enough information about the character through her actions and her interactions with her surroundings. I also felt that writing this week’s work as a story lets the reader first imagine or view it the way they want to before reading my analysis of it on how I imagined it, giving the opportunity to adapt the same story in more than one way.

There aren’t any specific themes being explored in this story. Rather the simple story allows it’s execution to be a lot more dramatic than it actually is. Animating this can create a suspenseful mood every time something dramatic happens in the eyes of the girl. The choice of making the protagonist a very young girl would allow the animation to be depicted through the thought process of a child which can result in a much more dramatic representation of a very menial task.