💧 Project 1

29/03/21 - 10/05/21 (Week 1 - Week 7)

Ng Mei Ying (0340563)

Film Studies & Cinematography
Project 1: Animation Story Research & Proposal (30% Individual)

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INSTRUCTION

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PROJECT 1: Animation Story Research & Proposal

 Pre-Production Stage 

(Week 1) 29/03/21: Expressing Memory Verbally

Today, students are tasked to record their own stories verbally. The story should be raw, authentic, personal yet emotional. It should be a memory that is easy to remember. Try to figure out the reason why you remember this memory so well? How does it relate to you and why is it important to you?

• 1A: Think of a memory that you remember vividly. 
• 1B: Why do you remember this so well? Connect it with one or more emotions.
• 1C: Express your memory and emotion in some way & record it. 

Reflection: I've got multiple memory flashed back in my mind easily at the moment, therefore I was encountering the difficulty to make a decision among those memories. After a short consideration, the memory with sheer naiveness was chosen as my verbal memory. 

(Week 2) 05/04/21: Transcript (Verbal Story)

The pre-recorded verbal memory needed to transform into a written form of a story (transcript) in a google document by today. On the other hand, students need to set a working title, main character name, and suggested theme for the verbal story.

Feedback: 

• Summary/Breakdown: A day out at the seashore, little April found beauty in everything she discovered, until she was "lost".
• Theme suggestion: The beauty of childhood. "Fear" is the strategy leading the narrative to the end.
• Suggestion for final: strong visual potential: the world been observed from April's eyes.
• Suggestion for Project 1 & 2: adapt the writing into visual storytelling. A beginning building up to April's expectation for the trip (or not).

(Week 2) 07/04/21: Abstract Image for Verbal Story

Students need to draw an abstract image for the verbal story by using lines and shapes. To start with the exercise, I decided to draw an abstract drawing by using photoshop with scribble lines and abstract shapes applied to express the memory of that moment. Blue colour and sand colour are the main colour tone for the drawing to depict the serendipitous moment.

Fig 3.0  The first draft of the drawing.

Fig 3.1  The final drawing for the abstract image.

(Week 3) 12/04/21: Transcript (Reframing & 3 Acts Structure)

This week, students needed to review their transcript writing and reframe the story in consideration of the camera's visual perspective. The descriptive sentence structure that is hard to convert into camera shots needs to be removed, which means that students require to filter the narrative from the story. Moreover, the 3 Acts structure needs to be adapted into the story with circumspection to avoid losing its authenticity as the principles don't always fit into the short animation video.

Feedback: The moment as the character discovering the amazing creatures from the surroundings could be the exciting factor. It is not necessary to have a strong story in the 20-second animatic trailer for the final project.

(Week 4) 21/04/21: Transcript (Story Structure Revise)

The lecture for this week was replaced by student consultation. Hence, there was no class on Monday slot. During my consultation slot on Wednesday, several suggestions were given by Martin in order to create a better story structure.

Feedback: Mr Martin suggested having different perspectives in the story to create visual contrast between the kid's imaginative perspective and the grown-ups perspectives to ensure that the audience and taste the difference as well as appreciate the kid's innocent perspective. 

1. Neutral Perspectives (Grown-ups): 
• mainly displaying the way on how neutral people looking at the natural surroundings.
  
  
2. Imaginative Perspectives (Kid): 
• A narrow visual perspective of a kid focusing on one small thing. The surroundings of the visa will be blurred out. Visual exaggeration will present making the scene interesting, funny and imaginative. This also aims to raise appreciation from the audience upon the beauty of the natural world from the kid's perspective. 

(Week 5) 28/04/21: Final Story Research Proposal

Project 1: Character's feature & characteristics

1. Identify 3 internal and external features of your main character?
• How does that correlate to your story?
  
  
2. How would the main character respond if trapped in an elevator / biggest crisis?
• Write your main character's responses in a paragraph. 
• Do a sketch on an A4 page about what happens.

Project 2: References & Research

1. Provide 3 photos & 3 animation characters as references.
2. Begin to design a character from SHAPE.
3. Draw character in thumbnail silhouette form, make it recognisable.
4. Draw 1st lineup of your main character.