Animated Narratives - Week 3

On a rainy night on a quit island, a weary pirate approaches a tavern. He is silent and darts his eyes around the room before making his way towards the barman. The two exchange glances, and the barman slips the pirate a piece of parchment. Back at his ship, the grew grows nervous, they all peer out at the dim light of the tavern, waiting until they see the small pale shadow of their captain. Once he is onboard, the crew gather around him, eagerly waiting to see what he has brought. Gold? Jewels? Food?

No.

Just a piece of parchment.

The captain grabs a lantern and holds it towards the parchment, and the light brings out the black of ink – a map! He holds it up triumphantly and the crew begin to cheer. It is time to set sail.

They journey for days on end, weathering storms of gargantuan size, and strange sea monsters never seen before by man (I envision this to play as a montage, separated by title cards with day 1, day 2 and so on). Each day, the crew grows smaller and smaller, and those that remain, are losing what little will they have left.

On the 5th day the skeleton crew is on the brink of giving up, the first mate climbs to the top of the deck to beg the captain to give up this mad hunt but stops. He sees the glimmer of a bright light, coming from what appears to be an island. He rushes down to get the captains attention, but the crew is already here, all staring mesmerised at the island, and the strange glow emanating from it.

They hurry to get down the row boats, all lack of energy suddenly gone. The remaining crew begins to board the boats and make their way to the island, now consumed by the glow. As they get closer to the island, they can make out the source of the glow, a giant treasure box glowing bright gold. All hell breaks loose. Its every pirate for themselves as they run ashore, fighting pushing and stabbing at their fellow crewmate to reach the treasure first. It is the captain who reaches the box first, pushing through his fighting crew.

As he approaches the box, he hears a trembling sound. Everyone is silent. The mad dash to the box stands still. The captain takes a step closer. The trembling gets louder. Another step and..

The ground opens beneath them, swallowing the treasure chest, leaving the captain to stare into the camera. Their whole journey, their meaningless race to the end, and it just All sunk before their feet.

Reflection

For Week 3, the idea we followed was story structure, particularly how to create a story from its resolution or end point. Our group chose to use “It all sunk before their feet” as our premise and worked backwards from there. We settled on a pirate adventure story, which I turned into a more fleshed out piece, which I wrote in the present tense, as a pseudo script that could be turned into an animation.

There is no dialogue present, and I think this could serve as a good starting point for a short built around large set pieces. I felt like the quick succession of the montage showing the perilous journey would be perfect for animation, showing more and more escalation before the climax of the story.

Overall, one of the big inspirations for this piece is the game Sea of Thieves (Rare, 2018), where in a sense of the pirate life is presented with little to no dialogue, and only player interaction and gesture. Additionally the idea of starting the story in a tavern stems from the games loop being to get quests from taverns.

The initial concept was a series of bullet points, that went over the key beats of the story, which we worked on as a group. I then went through and iterated on adding more detail, such as interactions between the crew and the captain and how that deteriorates over the course of the piece.