Animated Narratives Week 3 | Story Structures - Spider

During group discussions this week, we chose the premise “…she devoured every last one of them” as an ending point and worked backwards to come up with a short story idea. In our smaller group we briefly discussed how there are assumptions you make from that sentence, like the scale of the story, and that your first response is often limited in the potential scope. That had me thinking about the idea that the “she” in this instance did not have to be human in scale and in fact could be immense enough that the “every last one” could be viewed at a cosmic level. From there I ended up with this premise:

“The great cosmic spider swam from the recesses of space, the planets reflecting in her immense eyes. Looking upon the celestial bodies with alien indifference, she devoured every last one of them.”

From there I wanted to create a short animation to capture the sense of scale and to see how brief of a snippet is needed to convey my premise.

Cosmic horror is the horror of scale, the realisation that you are speck in a vast, seemingly infinite ocean of nothing that is indifferent to your very existence, a sensation that is perfectly conveyed by the animated film clip for Dye’s Fantasy, by Jérémie Périn.

For my own clip I have continued to develop and push my pixel art by restricting to a limited palette (4 colours/shades here) and by animating with far more frames than I have used before.