Week 1
- Alisha Gupta
- Apr 4, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: May 23, 2022
For our first week into this unit we were introduced to what we would be tackling for the next ten weeks. This was an exciting opportunity to be able to work in Animation by going over the material we were previously taught and being given the space to apply this in our own way. The brief outlined an Animated short film we were to design in 3D that should communicate a simple story with characters and a narrative that appealed to a wide audience.
This was also the first group project we were placed in and since working in a collaborative setting is crucial to nearly all areas of this industry it was important I learned how to collectively work on building an idea. The areas I was looking forward to working on were Character design, environment design, storyboarding and Animation, which included the Rendering and Compositing of the design. Most of these areas I realized were focused on the pre-production of a project and were rather 2D since I’ve always felt I had more control and practice in those areas that relied on drawing and composition.
Although once we were divided into our groups and the three of us spoke to each other we learned that what was ones weakness was another’s strength and that helped us quickly chart out a plan to follow for the next few weeks since there was a magnitude of work that had to be done in a really short amount of time. The first step we took was sharing story ideas that were brief and engaging.
After we shared our ideas and got feedback that the one I proposed was the most effective to portray, we went with my idea and that was inspired by the animation style seen in Pixar’s Toy Story. I thought of the idea of a young boy who gets bored playing with his ball in the kitchen of his home since he’s been left alone, and the act of him kicking it causes the ball to push the basement door open and fall through it into the dark below.
I think it was the infamous fear of the dark that I had growing up that pushed me to think of a humorous way a child would challenge himself to face it. That’s exactly what follows when he does. In fact go down to the basement after a brief ‘suit up’ sequence by wearing home- made armor taken from kitchen supplies he could reach (since he’s a short pre-pubescent child) This follows the third act of the film where he whips his spoon around in the dark and faces the shadow monster that turns out to be just a dusty old toy.
The next important step I wanted to follow, as outlined in the brief, was to write down a Story Logline and Synopsis. Additionally to this I wrote a narrative that read like a script for us to reference that was divided based on the Freytag Pyramid so we had clarity on what was the Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action and a Plot Twist Reveal that was recommended to us to consider since our story was becoming a bit too predictable and it needed an element of surprise that we gave by having a pair of eyes blink open In the dark as the child heads up the stairs of the basement revealing that there was indeed a cause for fear.
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