Animated Narratives - Week 5

Premise:

•  A greedy god who likes to collect the star as collections.
• He prepares to capture a beautiful star.
• He was horrified to find that he had become someone else's collection.

Story overview:

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 discussed the story structure, one formal structure we talked about is called the three-act structure, which is a basic narrative model that divides stories into three parts, set up, confrontation, resolution.

After class I tried this narrative model to expand my premise by using the diagram, it is like a story beat board. For this weekly premise, I have been requested to make a three-bullet points premise, so I make a premise based on last week’s story, it also is the story I want to develop in the studio 1 project.  Based on last week's work, I wrote a script for expanding this week's premise, the greedy god starts to capture the star. By writing a script and making a story beat board, I gain a clear story structure, and the core of the story has been set up as a powerful god who uses his power to collect whatever he wants, but finally, he has been collected by a more powerful existence in universal. Also, I do not plan to create a powerful existence character that shows at the end of the story, I just plan to give him a line rather than show his face, which is reminded by Kate in the comment.

The work I want to talk about is “Good intentions” (2018), which is an animation short shown in class. It depicts a story about a woman running away from a car accident, and some stranger things start happening in her life. Rather than talk about the plot, I want to talk about how I interpret the story structure. As personally, I thought the setup could be the first scene, the car accident happens, and the woman drives away. In the confrontation, the middle part turning point is the dog senses her and she cannot hold the kettle, these things mean her body is turning into a ghost, and the ending is when the man's heart attack happens to choose to stay with him rather than leave like last time and the story ends in here, which is an open ending. As personally, I interpret the core of the story as about guilt, woman is being responsible for a hit and run, her body has some strange change due to guilt, but at the end of the story, it seems like she makes redemption, she cannot go through the wall is the evidence. This animation has a clear structure, I think it is one of the reasons why it is successful.

A clear structure is an important element to achieving a remarkable story, I should spend more time polishing the story structure when I create a story in the future.