Animated Narratives - Week5

By Ashley (Chun-Yu Chen)

This work examines of narrative structure. In the class, we learnt  two important narrative structures for animation, which is 3 Stage Model/Paradigm and The Mythic Circle.

I am using the following precise

• There is a Cucumber warrior meditates at the waterfall.

• The Cucumber warrior is killing his vegetable enemies.

• In fact, they are all dinners.

The story is about a warrior who is a cucumber fighting his enemies and eventually killed by a predator. Begin with the shot of the cucumber meditating at a waterfall (implying washing with a faucet). As his enemy arrived, the fight began, or you can say it’s more like a slaughter. The cucumber killed the cabbage, the carrot, the potto, and finally came to the Hotdog. The Hotdog had no way to escape and consequently killed by the cucumber as well. However, at the same time, the warrior is sneak attacked by an unknown predator. In the end, we discovered that predator is a rabbit, and the whole story  had happened in his plate—They are all his dinner.

This story is going to sit in the field of 3D character animation. I think the fighting of vegetables will be interesting. People can enjoy the exaggerated performances of the characters from this linear narrative storyline. In addition, there is a lot of room for character design to develop funny characters. Imagine potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, and carrots with cartoon features but also in realistic textures!

This work is related to the week5 in class resources " Negative Space" and the Week4 watching material " Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist ". In my opinion, the structure of the " Negative Space" and my work tend to be 3 stage model rather than The Mythic Circle. They begin with a calm slow pace, introducing the background of the story and the personality of the protagonist. Then continue with the main content of the play, including several plot points. Finally, end with a clean but strong ending which may correspond to the topic of the whole story. Also in" Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist ", it indicates that “Joke” is an essential element exist in almost every Jones’s work, follows by a classic two-part structured. Which is-- making assumptions in the first part and proving it wrong in the second part.

By examining " Negative Space" , I reflected that handling the beats of the screenplay is vital. Referred to the name of the film" Negative Space", I think the beat control in the film is also excellent. The film is very good at using space, not just physical space, but time space as well. Sometimes there are pauses between the incidents and the character’s reaction, in that part, you can tell the story is slow, but not boring at all. I try to imitate this method in my work, having combination of motion and stillness. I think it is similar to dancing, sometimes the movements are slow, but sometimes the movements become very sharp. And the balance between them  is  what I want to achieve in my work.