Animated Narratives, Week #1，A black mouse found a shining coin lying in a small dusty treasure box.

wiki: A black mouse found a shining coin lying in a small dusty treasure box.

WORK

Character: A cat

Location: Swimming Pool

Action: 1. A cat is fishing next to the swimming pool

Story:

What if the cat falls asleep?  The cat falls into the pool and woke up immediately.

What if there is no fish in the pool? The cat feels upset and throws a stone into the pool to vent.

What if the cat fishes lots of fish? The cat eats fish and becomes a giant cat.

REFLECTION

This work is the first try at creating a story by asking questions like ‘What ifs’.

By asking ‘what ifs’ for different situations based on settled character, location and action, lots of possibilities of the endings arise. It’s a good way for generating ideas while starting to set the basics of a narrative: beginning and end. The ending is a goal that leads the story’s direction.

The animator and writer Andrew Stanton, of Pixar, points out in the Ted talk(https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story?language=en#t-77884). He says that storytelling is about everything from the first to the last, which is leading to a single objective. This concept is similar to the ‘What if’ and its taken result.

I found it was not as easy as I expected while thinking about ‘What ifs’, as thoughts may be limited in the character, location and actions that were set already before. But later I tried to dig more possibilities into the character itself, or the location itself, or the action itself. This did help me.