Animated Narratives - Week 9 (KJD)

Week 9 Reflection

For this week’s work, I created a flow chart. The theme for this week is Time, mutable and elastic. How can time be used in staging and communicating narration? As stated in the presentation for this week, time can either speed up or down, travel backwards and forward, loop, freeze or even skip. With this idea in mind, I created a scenario idea which is:

- A laundry machine has forward spinning and backward spinning effects. When spinning forward, the objects inside them move forward in time and when spinning back, objects move back in time. An example, keeping clothes in them, you can spin them back so that you get cotton out of them, or if you spin them forward, you get torn and rotten clothes.

I used a laundry machine as a time machine and the diagram shown in Fig.1, shows different objects as examples used in moving back in time or to the future

A relatable example of this is this animated short (A Single Life, 2017) where the vinyl record shifts around the time and the character goes back in time by spinning the vinyl back and vice versa. But in the end, a major accident occurs and they can’t control the record player. This leads to their death as the song from the record player ends.

This week's premise was a really interesting one as the idea of being able to control time can be used everywhere such as in animation, games or an interactivity piece. If there was a machine or in this case a laundry machine where you can put anything in and spin it, everyone would love that. They could put in an urn to bring back a loved one they lost, place in finished eatables and enjoy unlimited food and drinks, or place in clothes that you love but got ripped.

But with all of this, there comes cost as there are consequences with every choice you choose. If people magically free eatables and clothes, this could bring all the businesses to be closed down as nobody wants to buy their product, furthermore affecting the economy. As for bringing back loved ones, I think that everyone shouldn’t play God and be able to control someone else’s life. Everything has its own time and place and it would be emotionally taxing for that person as they will have to experience loss many times.

Week 9 References

- Vimeo. 2017. A Single Life. [online] Available at: <https://vimeo.com/225249697> [Accessed 11 May 2022].