Animated narratives - Week 6 Dialogue

This week we were discussing ‘DIALOGUE’ as a narrative device and part of character performance and design.

I am going to develop my premise, that I created for this week:

-‘The guinea pig dresses up hastily, turns to his wife and says

‘Enough! I’m going to dentist!’

* oinks, sobs holding tears

 ‘ I can’t live like this anymore, nobody respects me, I can’t find a job, can’t get into guinea pig community and everything because of my curve teeth! They ruin my life!’ *shouts 

Problem in this story: 

Sometimes we find wrong reasons for our problems. 

The guinea pig thought that other pigs doesn’t like him because of his appearance, but actually main character hurt other pigs without realising that and that was a reason.

In the beginning of the story dialogue and action work together in complementary relationship. Because it explains and supports the image of desperate and upset Pig and provides an understanding why he looks like that. 

The plot structure 

- The guinea pig desperate wants to go to dentist

- Fixes teeth

- Nothing has changed after guinea pig fixed his teeth, other pigs still continue to avoid communication with him

- He didn’t notice his habit of pinching the ears of other pigs while talking with them. And after he had fixed the teeth he still continued doing that. 

- Then one very straight-forward pig said to main character that what he does - hurts. Realisation came.

- He stopped doing that and became happy

- PS his wife didn’t have any ears

• For my premise I created a short dialogue for the first scene and character design sketches (images attached)
• While posting my premise I got a lot of response, loved Kate idea with veneers and Susan idea with GP being famous and going to an award night that’s why he needs teeth whitening. Famous GP may work as a journalist and host reality show about testing of houses for GP in the the pet shop. It would be funny I think, he may look glorified and pompous. 

As a related work for this week I want to represent stop motion animated short film ‘Hi stranger’ by Kristen Lepore. https://youtu.be/nZvMdMjAQSk  This is an example of an animation build on a monologue fully. We can see only one naked character who is lying and talking to us. There is a feeling of a real communication with him, because he asks questions, talks like he knows and understand us and even draws a picture of us. He provides emotional support to a viewer and in the same time animation looks so funny and unusual.  Image itself is very confusing and in the beginning feels like it plays contrary role with the monologue, but after a while you feel absolutely opposite, start to feel that they are united.