Animated Narratives - Week 3 (KJD)

Week 3 Reflection

For this week’s work, I created a rough animatic of my work. I explored the idea of characters. Especially looking at External Manifestation of the Internal State (EMIS). I thought of many premises for this week and they are:

- The earphones want to hear your music taste. So that it can enjoy the music with you.

- A bicycle wants to ride in the city by itself. But can’t unless someone hops on to it.

- An alarm clock feels sad every morning. Because everyone slaps it every morning to wake themselves up.

- A meat cleaver wants to retire from their job. It is scarred by chopping down meat.

From these premises, I chose the third one which is “An alarm clock feels sad every morning. Because everyone slaps it every morning to wake themselves up.” and expanded the story of it. The story goes like this:

- An alarm clock feels sad every morning. Because it gets slapped every morning to shut it up.

- It wants to run away from the owner. So it secretly disposes batteries so it doesn’t ring. But the owner keeps replacing them.

- One day, it stops getting a hit from the owner. The alarm clock is happy but finds out that it has been replaced by another alarm clock which is better than the previous one.

I created an animatic for this week’s premise using the free software called Storyboarder. I uploaded the video on Youtube and linked it to the references below (Dar, 2022). I decided to showcase my work in a form of an animatic. I wanted to test out how to make a storyboard for this week and while looking at the in-class resources, I found one of the useful links for free (open source maybe) software that I used. I opted for making an animatic as I can draw and express how the alarm clock feels through emotions such as happiness, sadness and anger.

From the class resources, I found this video (Ikea "Lamp" Commercial - Hi Res, 2007) where this animatic was inspired from. The ad uses more advanced techniques by using sound, camera angles and rain to express the feelings of the lamp. Even though the lamp can’t express anything, I was able to feel what it was feeling when it got abandoned. I didn’t implement the techniques from the video to my animatic, but I just drew facial expressions on the clocks to describe how they were feeling.

Personally, the animatic could have been a bit better if I draw simple facial expressions and import them into a game engine and just do simple animations of the clock. With a game engine, I would be able to implement rain, sound and camera angle easier as I am working in a 3D space instead of 2D. But from a learning experience point of view, It is a good start as I don’t draw “professionally” and with limited knowledge, I was able to express emotions of inanimate objects.

Week 3 References

- Dar, K., 2022. Animated Narratives. Week 3 - Alarm Clock. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/fxDG6uls32E> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

- 2007. Ikea "Lamp" Commercial - Hi Res. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/dBqhIVyfsRg> [Accessed 1 April 2022].