Animated Narratives week 8

Week 8: Time

The theme of this week's class is "Time". Time is arguably the most important element in the composition of a story. Before learning this week's lesson, I thought that it is like the skeleton of a human being, because it is the skeleton that holds the human being together. Instead of being like a soft slime symbolizing weakness and unable to do anything. My thinking this week has been in the direction of how to make my story more holistic through what I have learned in class.

During the learning process I had more thoughts: the timeline is like a human skeleton, because having a skeleton is why the muscles have different uses. A timeline can divide a whole story into seemingly unrelated pieces, and when these pieces are linked together by a single message it makes the story more suspenseful and interesting while highlighting the integrity of the story.

I was inspired by a passage in “The Judas Window” in which Ansville meets Mary Hume at a Christmas house party in Sussex, and the two fall in love so quickly that they can't help themselves. Twelve hours after their first encounter, the two begin discussing marriage; and on New Year's Day, they are engaged to be married. Ansville's cousin, Captain Reginald, tried to ask him for fifty pounds as an introducer. Mary wrote to her father to tell him she was engaged, and he wrote back to congratulate her. This description does not feel important at the beginning, but it is an important cause of the case, because the time between their love and marriage is very short, and Mary's father did not meet Ansville before the story of the subsequent mistaken identity and therefore the design to kill. This use of the timeline creates a sense of suspense for the reader before the mystery is revealed, which is exactly what I need when learning to write a story.

After this week's work, I realized that the timeline is not only a tool to support the framework of the story, but also to create a sense of suspense through the use of reasonable time division and reversal of order. I hope that in the future, when the story is visualized on screen, the timeline will be interspersed with the narrative to increase the audience's perception and make the story more three-dimensional.