Animated Narratives - Week 4

Story: Once upon a time, there is a greedy god, who lives in the clouds. He likes to collect various novelty items. He uses a fishing rod to obtain these items. The god keeps collecting items regardless of the effect on the mortal world. He wants to collect more precious objects and creatures to enrich his showcases. One day, he sees a beautiful blue hexagonal star, then he realizes that he had never gained a star before, so he starts to prepare for the capture of the star. However, the star belongs to another, higher-ranking god, so the greedy god is hooked and thus becomes someone else's collector's item.

In this weekly class, we did a practice about making a conclusion premise to build up a story. I re-do the practice after class. This time, I used the bullet point to develop the story structure.

The story I made is about a greedy god who keeps collecting items regardless of the effect on the mortal world. Eventually, because of his greed, he ends up as a showpiece for the other. I interpreted the main idea of the story as Good will be rewarded with good while evil with evil. Through this practice, I understood the difference between story and plot. Changing the order of the plot allows the writer to decide how to tell a story to audiences, for example, I can put my premise as the first scene and then use the following scenes to explain how it becomes this ending.

The work that impresses me this week is Lost & Found, which is shown in class. It is a stop motion animation short film. It depicts a story about a string toy doing the sacrifices to save the other toy, who accidental drop into the water. The story idea is designed ingeniously, the string toy uses the string on its body to save his friend, in the meantime, he sacrifices his life, and this plot not only develops the story, but it also makes audiences empathize with emotion.

Premise: The fisherman packed his gear and looked at today's harvest with satisfaction, an island, a kingdom, and a dragon.

Bullet point:

• A greedy god who likes to collect various novelty items which are displayed in his showcase.
• He uses a fish rod to obtain these items for fun.
• He wants to collect more precious objects and creatures to enrich his showcase.
• The god got a beautiful island by using peace as bait to make a deal with the island's owner, he promises that the creatures on this island will not be bothered by humans anymore.
• There is a cake kingdom civilization (there is a civilization of the Cake Kingdom, which attracts the god. The people who live in the Cake Kingdom love to eat cake.
• The god makes a cake that is the same as the whole country, then he sets up the cake as bait on his hook and puts the hook down to the mortal world.
• When people see the big cake, they rush into the cake, and the god pulls up the whole cake kingdom.
• The god found a dragon, which is a protector of the continent, he uses the shiny huge gold to hook the dragon.
• The fisherman packed his gear and looked at today's harvest with satisfaction, an island, a kingdom, and a dragon.