Master Of Animation, Games & Interactivity
Master Of Animation, Games & Interactivity

This work examines the structure of story and plot also the concept of animation editing.

It is started from the mind map I made last week. To explore the structure of story, I tried to form a story by connect those events and fill them into the 3-stage structure. Literally I started frame the story from nothing, the structure helps me connect all those events and plots and put them into an interesting story.

The video “How Do You Actually Edit an Animated Film?” also stated a similar idea. (Short video essay from No Film School on approaches to editing in animated film) By arranging plots and frames in a good order, that is the contribution of editing for a good animation. Alyssa Maio explained more about 3 act structure in “What is the three act structure?”. The crisis should be happened between confrontation and resolution. In my work I put the crisis part which is the character found out the fact and reason of that ghosts in the end of confrontation and the beginning of resolution.

Through my work, I realized an animation is not needed to have a fixed story. When I started from the mind map, the goal of animation I thought was the teacher found out her students are ghost. But when I tried to fill those events into structure, I thought of that there could be a better connection between psychic’s word and the character. I started to think what if the character herself is also a ghost. What if the ghost who need a closure is her? By doing that, I realized that process of editing and filling into the structure is actually improving the product by finding a better connection between plots.

About This Work

By Xipeng Niu (Xavier)
Email Xipeng Niu (Xavier)
Published On: 15/04/2021