Animated Narratives Week 5 s3766325 Xincheng Wang

Story

Inside a city zoo, a zoo keeper exchanges identities with a real tiger for some reasons. In front of the tiger cage, a kid accompanied by his mom is observing a sleeping tiger. ‘Mom, if the tiger gets out, will it eat us?’ Asked the kid. ‘Of course, honey. Let’s go to fish zone.’ The mother seems impatient because the tiger keeps lying there for a long time without any moves. ‘All right, mom.’ The boy compromised. However, after a while, the tiger inside the cage awakes, stretched and yawned. Its growling stomach reminds it of dinner time. It rings the bell expertly, not for a while, the zoo keeper pushes a meal carts inside the cage. The tiger takes of the tiger mask and gets ready for the big meal which is prepared by the zoo keeper. Obviously, this fake tiger dressed up by a human has already got accustomed to the life in the tiger cage. He forks a piece of nice steak and shovels it into his mouth. ‘I will never work in my life’ says the man, with satisfaction on his face. 

The zoo keeper continues to push the meal cart along the path of the zoo, with his eyes staring at every kind of animals inside cages. When he arrives the giraffe area, he stops. It looks he is interested in them. After hesitating for a moment, he goes into that cage, feeds the giraffes with prepared food. Giraffes do not notice the danger is approaching at all. After a long time, the zoo keeper pushes the cart out of the empty cage, makes a belch. ‘I will definitely work forever.’ He said to himself.

Reflection

In this work, I try to make a story coherent by adding some small key dialogues. During our class group discussion, we chose two dialogues from wiki as our expanding target: 

1. A child was heard asking his mother a question at the zoo. ‘If the tiger gets out, will it eat us?’

2. ‘I will never work in my life.’

Through the thumbnails I draw, I explored different functions of a dialogues, such as show inside activities, personality of a character. There could be a specific meaning delivered by a simple sentence no matter when the character speak to himself or others. Further, by drawing these pictures, I tried to present the relationship among a character’s facial expressions, motions and dialogues, they should be coordinated. Similar work Turning point (2020)by Steve Cutts also explored the consequence of identities exchanges of human and animals, which inspired me in making animal characters. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LDk4D3Q3U