Animated Narratives Week4

By Xiying Yao (Eve)

Wiki premise：‘ Hamster knock off people ’

Story in the images1-10

Reflective Text

The theme of this story is an adventure animation, the protagonist is a hamster and a scholar, the story of this work is from the Chinese classical novel adaptation. This work can show the loveliness of the hamster through the animation of squeezing and stretching. The deformation phenomenon of squeezing or stretching will occur while the object is moving under force, which can create the illusion of flexibility and vitality for the audience, and can also provide the viewer with information about the hardness and softness of the object. The anthropomorphic movements and character of the hamster are similar to those of Pixar's Ratatouille (2007) and Rob Minkoff's Stuart Little (1999). At first I wanted to continue using a simple textual narrative approach to present the story, but after studying Tsai-Yun Mou's paper From storyboard to story: Animation content development, which compares two different approaches. The results show that storyboarding as a method of creating animated content is feasible, and that a good story structure can still be created using a storyboard-driven approach. The contribution of this model is more in the story climax, resolution and plot than in the traditional process. The results of this study can help novice designers with animation content training. So this time I chose the storyboard approach to storytelling.

Reference:

Pixar, Ratatouille, 2007, viewed date:12/8/2021

Rob Minkoff, Stuart Little, 1999, viewed date: 12/8/2021

Tsai-Yun Mou, Tay-Sheng Jeng, Chien-Hsu Chen, From storyboard to story: Animation content development, 2013, viewed date:16/8/2021