Animated Narratives Week 3

The work I made this week is a short animated film called "Little Lion" which investigates self-acceptance.

I worked with the premise written by Shika that "A cat looks in the mirror and a lion appears". I thought that drawing a cat growing a lion's mane in the mirror would be a good way for me to practise my skills in very simple animation. I developed a story board and scanned them and then added the animated clip at the end of a timeline in Premiere just to see if the film made sense using only the storyboards I had made. Because I'm a perfectionist, I added a whole lot of other elements....

From Linda Aronson's reading I tried the technique of writing out fragments and then laying them out on a chart with "Beginning" and the start, then "Middle" then "End" because I was thinking about making something with a very clear three-act structure.

Very early in the process I decided that the lion looking back in the mirror would be an end-point of the film. The cat realises she isn't a human, and is finally ready to accept this fact because she's realised she's pretty cool the way she is.

I knew from Aronson that I needed two turning points in the film, and that the climax of the film (which usually is or leads to the second turning point) comes when the protagonist is closest to death and musters up all their strength. So my second turning point comes about when the cat is very sad but then saves the dog from the falling hammer anyway. The first turning point is when the cat is told it's not a human for the first time. So then I had my beginning, middle, and end: in the beginning the cat is happy and sees itself as a human, the same as its owner; in the middle it has been told it's not a human, and is sad and confused; at the end it has accepted that it is not a human, it's something else, and it is pleased. It returns to normal in the sense that it returns to being content.

I have been trying to write screenplays for a long time now but I usually hate working with traditional structures in any sense. I'm sort of realising now that this has been holding me back, and so I think making some vaguely simple stories is a good way to start.