Idea 1 “Hero”:
For the first idea, I am going to tell a story about illusionary realities, and it is about a “refugee of death penalty” imagining himself as a “war hero”. The approach I want to choose is animated stop motion.
There will be two main sets, one representing the reality world (black and white/ ridiculous and dramatic/ pantomime as classic silent movie), the other his own imaginative world (colored/ baroque of style?). I want to illustrate the narrative of the main character’s own point of view, and let the audience be with his world with him by representing the “reality” and “illusion” in a very subjective way.
I have not yet have any experience with stop motion but with marionette and paper puppets.
Idea 2 “The Box”:
For this idea, the main topic is going to be about the symbolized “box” as a psychological horror concept that might could be fitting into every genre. I want the narrative style be like the movie Enter the Void, containing a lot of montages and flashbacks. Developing the storyline and the reason the main character has been paranoid about the “box” based on his conversation with his therapist and ending up getting locked in to a madhouse.
The main approach will be experimental /cult animation with AE mainly, and for some of the flashback or references in their dialogue with comic strips/ stop motions/ etc.
I have previous experience with experimental animation and AE.
Idea 3 “Taking to the Next”:
For this idea, which is a sub-idea of the idea 2 (this is a single reference in their conversation), I want talk about the concept of the dimensions and time and their relationships as well as the tragic greed in human nature.
I also want to take this approach as of an experimental animation.
If to take a step back, and to really dig into why without a specific storyline, the most common core of those three ideas is psychological fear. And this is what I truly want to navigate about. I think there are two main drives that will make humans stronger: the hate and the fear. The Fear of the Darkness is the first animation movie that I saw and the other one is La Planete Sauvage (the Savage Planet?), they are both French and they both talk about fears: complex fears. They are about political, religious, or just nature genetic fears that we have as soon as born; the fear of living and dying; fear of the “system” is how the “system” will eventually work and keep functioning.
I have always had the great awe in horror: Gothic, Dark romanticism, ultra violence, cultness, and so on, and has did my ARS as in the relationship with Gothic and Romanticism, yet there are so much beyond that, there are so many sub-cultures of the “darker” side of the aesthetics that need to be talked and presented about. This is what I essentially and eventually want to do I guess.
As for my previous skills and experience with animation, I have always have great interests with editing and art production in a way, as well as the habit of writing and publication of collections of novels during my earlier years.
The reason why I want to chose animation as the final presentation for my narrative is that animation is more than movie in way of narratives and less than novel or comics for vagueness. It is about lens, and it is a complete subjectiveness. I have tried many ways of narratives: novels, illustrated books, comics, yet animation is the way I want my stories to be told for now. And I want to find the cuteness in my darkness.
As for detailed scripts, here are one rough draft/ the story I want to tell the most for now:
WAR HERO (Stop Motion)
A man without hands sitting in his cell, a tiny and shabby room with only one metal table and a metal bed. He acts like he is waiting for someone, excited like a child. In his imagination, he is waiting for a reporter long after the Great War, to interview him and to put his glorious story onto the newspaper. Yet he is charged for treason and he is waiting for a final judgement for his death penalty.
Door bell ranged, and he jumped from his chair to open the door. The army officer came in, and sat beside the table, and started to ask him questions. He began to show him the photos, the badges he “won” during the war, and the local newspaper with a big title War Hero during Bombing, Saving Life. The officer looked super confused, and looked on the things, nodding his head, to let him take another look at it.
The moment he saw those things, they began to change, the photo of his imaginative “pregnant daughter who will be married happily” turned into a corpse of an innocent pregnant woman who was killed by him during the war by accident; the badges’ names turned into randoms names because he stole them from dead soldiers; and as for the newspaper, the tittle changed into him getting caught due to hiding in the bombing shelter, and ate his comrade and his hands for survival.
He is shocked and refused to accept the truth, yet the name of his comrade is on one of the badge and in the end, a scene of his comrade returning to his home from the war and for whether this is reality or imagination, is left unsaid.
It is really hard for me to tell this story since I want to do it as a classical silent movie, and to tell whether a scene is of his imagination or his reality in colors and set. I want to tell the story purely through gestures and visual representations.
