Animated Narratives Semester 1 - Week 1

Character: A country girl

Location: Warehouse

Action: Travel by a magic hole

Story: Helen is a country girl living in Brisbane. One day she found a magical hole in an abandoned warehouse. She is sucked into the hole and enters a completely strange place. She feels scared and walking aimlessly until another girl called to her. Helen has come to England, and the two girls travel together, enjoy food and become friends. At night, when Helen wants to go home, the hole suddenly appears again, Helen is sucked into the hole, back to the warehouse. This struck her as incredible. The next day, she goes to the hole again, but this time she is transported to Singapore. She experiences a different culture and feels excited. But when she tries to continue her journey, the hole reappears and she knows she must back. After that, she goes to different places through the hole and makes friends. One day, Helen finds that the warehouse was locked up and she could not get in. No matter how she explains what had happened in the warehouse, no one believes her. The outside world becomes more and more fascinating to her. She wants to explore the world in other ways. She publishes her experiences on the Internet, learns about the cultures of different countries. She takes up traveling as a hobby, saves money, learns foreign languages, and explores more different places. One day, as Helen was getting ready to go, the hole appears outside the window, but she knows that she does not need it.

In the first week, we briefly covered examples that make up a good story, and the metaphor. I created a short story about it. The story revolves around an important object with some kind of metaphor and lets the audience gradually understand what the metaphor is and the core idea of the story.

In this story, the hole represents a wish or a medium. People want to connect with more people and cultures all over the world, and this hole is a way to do that. The warehouse represents some kind of resistance, whether it is our shyness or lack of courage, people's prejudices, or the objective limitations of reality. But our hero breaks through this limitation, and her desire to communicate with the world exceeds the limitation, so in the end, the hole comes back to her. But even without a hole, she can communicate with the world, which is the main idea I want to show.

In the animation video Cloud Cover ( https://vimeo.com/19201957 ), it uses the cloud as a metaphor for depression or negative emotions, as we know that this "cloud" does exist in our lives, but we need the "sun", which means positive emotions to face it. 

By exploring metaphors, I practiced developing a story with deep meaning from a simple object, and I tried to make this object run through the story, which wasn't as difficult as I thought. When inspiration runs out, maybe try to think about an object and give it a special meaning.