Story: A man lived in a peaceful village. But one day, the town was invaded. Unfortunately, he lost his home and family because of the war, and he was the only one who survived. He felt lonely and missed his family when he wandered around. He gradually lost the motivation to live.
At the lowest point of his life, he saw a brother and sister begging on the street. Then he gave them all the money he had. Two children started to follow him. He asked them where their home was and wanted to send them back. The brother said that the war had destroyed their home, and their parents died when protecting them. The man felt sorry for the pair of children, so he decided to adopt them.
They traveled all over the world and helped people who got in trouble. The people receiving their help would return them food to show their gratitude. They gradually increased their number by adopting orphans. The man thought he should find a safe place to build a home for those children. So he started to build a house in a ginormous tree and settled all the children so that they would not have to wander around anymore. After that, the man kept helping the homeless children. They gradually became one big family, and the men were no longer alone.
The theme this week is Plot and the Shapes of Stories. This week our group created a few key points of the story based on Kai Sean Eng's premise: "The father of a hundred children built a ginormous treehouse with multiple rooms for each of his kids." Then, I tried to continue to refine the story. Firstly, I designed a few questions: What did the man go through? Why did he build the house? Where did all the children come from? Those questions helped me to create a more structured and purposeful plot. I answered these questions step by step through the progression and development of the story, creating a better personality of the characters and a comprehensive narration. This story primarily intends to express the harm that war brings to people. And because human beings are weak, they have to unite and face the danger together to overcome the difficulties. At the same time, I drew a rough character design and art style. I want to use this drawing style to show a soft and warm story.
A similar animation is "Frangin" created by EMCA Angouleme(https://vimeo.com/39408892). This story is about a young boy's father who went to war. The boy wrote a letter and used a carrier pigeon to deliver the letter, but he never received a reply from his father. This story talks about the damage war does to families. And peace can only be made by all of us.
After this week's exercise, I have a deeper understanding of the structure of a story. Creating a story based on the premise of its ending is something that I've never tried before. I used to get stuck with creating an ending for a story. But this week's premise exercise gave me a new way to produce a story, designing the end of the story in advance and then retrodicting the story's setting. I believe this method will be of great help in my future writing.
