Animated Narratives - Week 5 (KJD)

Week 5 Reflection

For this week’s work, I created a chart using this week’s premise in mind. These are the premises that I thought of:

- A cat falls overboard from the ship into the sea. It tries to stay afloat but it is scared of the water.

- A shark is lurking in the sea and notices the cat is in the water.

- The shark approaches the cat, and it helps the cat aboard the ship.

From these premises, I chose the third one which is “A cat falls overboard from the ship into the sea. It tries to stay afloat but it is scared of the water.” and expanded the story of it. As a group in class, we worked and expanded upon the story:

- The cat fell off the ship trying to play around with humans on the deck

- The cat is sinking into the ocean

- There is a shark swimming around in the distance and approaching the cat.

- The shark opens its jaws and grabs the cat. But it doesn’t eat the cat.

- It helps the cat go onboard by holding it between the jaws.

- (Flashback) When the shark was young, he got traumatized at a young age as his parents got abducted by a mysterious fishing boat and cut off their fins and threw the body in the ocean. The baby shark couldn’t save them as he was too small to help them out. So from that point in time, he converted to vegan and decided to save the cat.

- People on the shore saw there is a shark following and lurking around the boat which seems scary, but actually, the shark is happily eating the seaweed and mosses at the bottom of the boat. And the cat secretly kicks over a barrel of veggies to the sea to feed its friend.

For the same story above, there was also an alternative ending where we added a twist:

- A shark is looking for meat and he sees a cat falling from a boat far away.

- But when he is approaching the cat, he finds it is a tiger

- This tiger is also looking for fish for dinner. But a big fish is a shark. It mainly wants to eat the fins.

- The shark becomes the food.

I created a chart for this week’s premise as shown in Fig.1 below. The chart is a mixture of flowchart and mindmap as the story is linear but we introduce a backstory of the shark character. I chose this method as the story we made with the shark and cat is linear but we have two choices as we also had an alternate ending (where the cat eats the shark). I also added a mindmap as we wanted to explain the backstory of the shark to give the reader an idea of how the shark became vegan. 

Our story is similar to this animation video I found (OukamiShoujo, 2012). It tackles the same idea where the audience perceives the prey is gonna get eaten by the predator but in reality, the roles get reversed. In both cases, we build up suspense for the audience and then at the final moment, we reveal the roles being reversed.

From the feedback I received, the story for this premise was not fleshed out properly as we have some ‘potholes’ to fill out. Such as does the tiger know the shark is a baby? Do we know the shark is a baby? We have to build up suspense for the reader and make them expect what the ending is, but in reality, we create a twist near the end of the story.

Week 5 References

- OukamiShoujo, 2012. Predator and Prey. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/XPATrdi9RdU> [Accessed 6 April 2022].