Animated Narratives week 10

Week 10: Light

This week's class topic was "Using Light". To be honest, at the beginning of the week I didn't think that this direction of study should be on my radar, as I designed the storyboard to be more text oriented. But trying to get the reader to feel the mood and emotion in the text through the use of light was a pipe dream. The direction I tried this week was to explore the role of light and how it can be used in text.

In the course of the course, I discovered some possibilities for light. Light can be used metaphorically to express emotions that are not well stated directly in the text, leading the audience to think about the atmosphere. Based on this discovery, I felt that I needed some reflection and inspiration.

First of all, thanks to the fairy tale "The Little Match Girl" that I read when I needed to find information for other subjects, there is no doubt that the faint light of the matches in the cold winter brought hope to the little girl, and as she polished the matches every time in the cold and desperate environment of survival, the warm light of the fire was both a clue and an emotional support for the audience. After learning how light can be used in the text I found that light is not only an indispensable element in fairy tales, but also in mystery novels. Because the use of light may become an important clue to the decipherment of the case: for example, John Dickson Carr's "The Three Coffins” has this description: "There is only one room on the top floor, a ray of light from the dappled skylight cast to the floor. The whole house was immersed in darkness at this time, except for the two shutters on the first floor, the light came through, illuminating the small door to the basement. I thumped my shoulder a few times before I remembered that I could climb out of the window and come back in via the front door or the small door in the basement." A few descriptions of the light brought out the clues to cracking two almost simultaneous secret room cases.

Inspired by the above, I tried to use the light to solve the clues: "The room was not lit, only the sunlight scattered across the sea into the secret room of the Dragon Court. The dark blue seems to be no matter what is discussed here will not be known to outsiders. Because the sea surface fluctuates with the wind, the direction of sunlight scattering becomes unstable. With this dim blue light to see, security personnel found two people lying down inside the room. Looking through that dim light, there seemed to be a puddle of dark red liquid around one of them. The crowd was alarmed because it was blood." It is still just a description of the use of light, and the details will be filled in later in the process of creation, so that this description of light can really be used in solving the case.

After this week's study, I realized that in a mystery story, any detail can be an unexpected clue. In the future, we need to pay more attention to the creation process, so that the suspense story will not be bland to guess the outcome, reducing the exploration and readability.