Week 3 - Character
For week three, I have the knowledge about the role of character in storytelling. The character often drives the story, so the sculpture of character is quite important. During this week, I came up with some premise and use it to create characters for my MAGI studio1 as well.
Week 3 individual premise entries:
- A little girl is pulled into the story world by monsters while reading a fairy tale book
- People’s shadow can do what they are afraid to do.
- Humanity is extinct and robots have taken over the planet
- The wolf turns into a man every night of the full moon
- Robots that can wreak havoc on cities or even the planet are only afraid of kittens
Development of premise entries:
A girl with social anxiety disorder is afraid of making friends or even communicating with strangers. Her shadow chats with people for her and mingle with the group very well and becomes good friends with everyone. However, one day the sky was covered with dark clouds and the shadow slowly faded away, leaving no way to communicate with people for the girl. The girl anxiously tries to keep the shadow and lunges at it, but the shadow dissipates and melts into the girl's body. Finally, the girl plucks up her courage, tries to talk to strangers and really becomes friends with everyone.
The similar work is called ‘If anything happened, I love you’, which is an 2D animated short film, written and directed by Will McCormack and Michael Govier. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kH75xhTpaM). At the beginning of the film, the couple are not communicating, but their shadows are arguing with each other. It is interesting that the interaction between the two shadows can indirectly show the broken relationship between this couple. And the shape of those shadows are worth to reference as well.
The two main characters will be the girl and the shadow. At the beginning, I created a series of girl’s profiles to show how different emotions look like on her, and series of shadow’s actions. However, the girl's hair is unnecessarily complicated, and at the same time, it makes the girl and her shadow look like they don't exist in the same world. At the end, I refined those drawings, gave the girl a simple bob hair, and test the expression of both characters.
This week’s reading:
From this week’s reading ‘The Circle of Being’, there introduced a method called ‘circle of being’, it lets you dig into the emotional substance and dimension of your character. It is a process that allows you uncover an incident or event in your character’s life that emotionally parallels and impacts the story line. Though the reading, I also have noticed that age ten to sixteen is most important in a person’s life, since from 9-10 years old, children start to communicate their needs, they can definite personality, singular and individual voice. From 15-16 years old, it is a growth of human intelligence, rebels against everything, they try to find their own voice and look forward into the world for role models. I hope those information that I would utilize in further story shaping.
Downloads:
-
Download File: shadow-character-design.png
Download File: shadow2-retfine.png
Download File: week2-character-design.png
