Week 1 - Stories
During the first week’s lecture, we have been given an idea that what is a story and the three key elements of story – characters, place/ location, and action. Beside the key elements, there are still some parts that would make a story richer, which are intention/ want/ need, obstacle, and resolution.
From this week’s watching ‘The Art of The Metaphor’, I got a better understanding about metaphor. Unlike ‘sweet like honey, strong as a tree’ those kinds of similes, metaphor is letting you feel and know something differently. Metaphors help us to associate with a complex world. They make concepts more real and tangible to us, so we are better able to digest certain concepts. During the in-class exercise, I pick up the premise ‘A metallic dog struggles to free itself from the surface of a magnetic planet’, and I am going to use the method of metaphor to create a new premise and a storyboard.
‘The rose envies the water lily for being able to float in the water, while it is confined to the soil. When the rose struggles to escape the soil, it withers’.
This is a metaphor hint at sometimes forcing yourself out of your environment to a wrong one is counterproductive.
Another watching from this week is called ‘The clues to a great story’, given by Andrew Stanton who is an animator and writer of Pixar. In this talk, it mentioned a really interesting theory called ‘Unifying Theory 2+2’, it means that do not give audiences four, give them 2+2, make the audience put things together. It would be a useful concept that I might use in further studies.