Through this week’s study, I learned the following aspects:
Do I have a good story? Is it readable, engaging and surprising?
Characters and performances work together, so it’s important to understand how they work. Most movies have a hero or main character that runs through the movie. Movies are usually about them, about their pursuits, their goals or whatever factors they are trying to overcome. When you have multiple characters, the film is not about the individual, it’s about the whole theme. Anything a character does, it could be a story. Whether it’s engaging enough, whether it’s surprising enough, whether it’s novel enough that ultimately if the audience cares about something, then they might stop and watch it. So it’s pretty hard to get someone to care about something, and sometimes the function of characters is attracting the audience. In Sweet Cocoon, the crux moment of the movie is that when it turns into a butterfly, it’s eventually taken away. So everything is geared towards that scene, which is the key scene of the movie. In a sense, that’s the surprise. That’s what attracts you. You start caring about the butterfly, and then you get a feeling for it, and then it’s gone. It’s a very powerful piece of storytelling, a character, an environment, they have a problem to solve, and it’s a series of individual pieces. A lot of it is off-screen, a lot of the action is implied by audio, and you don’t always have to tell a full story in a traditional and meaningful way. As long as you have the main characters and we know where they are, those sound effects make sense. The characters have to be engaging, you have to do something else, to make the audience care about the characters, in order for the audience to be with the characters, to travel with them, to fret with them. How do you do that, yes, through the initial vision, think about how compelling the character design is inside. It also has to do with how they move, and how they behave, and how they speak. And the more strongly they react to others, the more they gain personality in the process.
How will the structure and treatment of the film tell the story?
You break down the structure of the story. How does it work, how does it tell the story? This is an important means of understanding how stories are organized. In terms of how storytelling works within these frames, maybe move the end of the story to the beginning, and then the beginning to the end. Because if you organize it in a different way. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell the story. You need to know how to structure the story to make it happen, physically and physically. Because you need to act it out and execute it. The story breaks the rhythm from different angles. It allows you to analyze things in a critical way. Basically, you know what tricks they use to get what they want.
How will character design, action, staging, and performance advance the story?
How the character will create the action, I mean analyzing how the main character is involved, what the character will do to move the story forward. Look at the story through the lens of the character, not through the structure. So in most movies, the main characters are the driving force throughout the story, and the movie won’t be successful without the characters’ footprints. Because the stories about them are about their vulnerability, about their passion and so on. I think the most important thing is to know or have similar experiences. When it becomes a universal experience, the audience immediately relates to those characters, their plight, and I think that’s an important factor, so the characters themselves become the story.
Character Dimensions:
Animation provides a broader definition of character by reinterpreting human form, applying anthropomorphism, bringing inanimate objects to life, and making it possible for everything to interact. Animation has more elements for characters than other forms. We can reinterpret the human form, and the character in the animation can become a true shapeshifter, you know it’s a character with multiple characteristics and personalities. If they are flat characters. In that case, how a flat character moves the story forward. But it can also be a round character who learn something and move the story forward. That allows them to show their situation and reveal to the audience what’s going on. How a character performs in that scene, what makes that scene work, It’s important to communicate effectively to the audience.
We can perform without dialogue, and make elements happen. You can create possibilities with minimal performance attributes. There is no dialogue, which is indicative of the character. If that’s your limit, then that’s a good thing, because it means you have to perform. It can’t just be a traditional perform, it has to be something that performs in that context. It was their behavior, in a sense, that created this unique way of performing. Some story that doesn’t have any dialogue, you know it has a backstory and so on, so it’s complicated. It need to explain what kind of person the character might be and how to handle things. The key moment in ‘For The Birds’is about six minutes. If you watch that animation, the eyes are the only thing that’s really acting. If you watch it over and over again, the body is moving, but the acting comes entirely from the eyes. So in a sense, the face is the body, the body is the face, and you can communicate powerfully in a very simple way. It’s the most important, the perfect timing, orchestrated for his simple narrative, but not an easy thing to do. But they are beautifully constructed. In a sense, you have two very different worlds, how you move between them? how you tell stories in both environments? In fact, they’re much harder in the short film. Structurally, you have to get it right from the beginning, and you don’t have much time to reach a conclusion, a further conclusion, which is very important in the story. For example, the story of 60 years, told in just a few minutes, can uses a prop throughout to connect with the things that are already in the past.
I think I need to spend time studying award-winning animation. They’re still mainstream, so it’s important to pay attention to the elements in those award-winning films. I need to study how the story develops, the structure of the story, and if I can, compare those animation, see if there’s any difference or similarities between them.