Animated Narratives - Week 8

This week we explored new narrative forms and worked on using animation to generate narratives from a range of different sources such as data, interactive processes, etc.

I came up with the following premise in class: A mysterious haunted house in which each room has a ghost/ object that comes to life and tells pieces of the story of its former inhabitants

Going into this further, I developed Mozart’s Haunted House. The idea is an interactive house of a dead famous person, in which the user can move across rooms and interact with various objects in the house to know the life story of the person. In this case I went with Mozart.

This work is inspired by the interactive website we saw in class in Week 7 - Welcome to Pine Point by Paul Shoebridge & Michael Simons of The Goggles (https://pinepoint.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint). The website is an interactive documentary about what happens when you lose your job, when everyone you know loses their job, when your entire town is out of work, is shut down and dismantled, and completely disappears. It is part book and part film, and an extremely interesting way to tell a story that makes the audience feel a part of the journey.

Through this activity I was able to understand how animation and narrative can serve many other things that aren’t traditional fictional narrative media, and can be used to tell a story in a different way. This was also the first time I developed an interactive concept, which was quite fun.