To begin the process of my final animation, I did the stream of consciousness exercise in class. After writing down what felt like a hundred random words, I singled out the ones that I felt most interested in, in terms of exploring them for my final.
The words I chose were
- nightmare
- narcissist
- parent
After pondering over these words for a while, I chose to work on the theme of narcissistic personality disorder. I brain stormed on the ways that I could create a narcissistic persona and perhaps animate on his/her face and show expressions. This was my first idea.
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- Playing with the idea of a split personality
However, when I thought about my animation style and interest in displaying a narrative, I felt like just playing with the face and showcasing the emotions of a person diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder wasn’t enough, and I wanted to convey a storyline that was more ambiguous and had a beginning, middle and end.
Again, I went back to my words : narcissist, parents & nightmare.
I chose to create a story based on the concept of “attachment theory” which stems back to the idea that sometimes we fall into the relationship we watch growing up. Our parents.
Sometimes, people choose mates who resemble their parents not because of fond memories, but to make amends for an unhappy childhood.
and I want my animation to show how a little girl watched the mistreatment of her mother by her father who was a narcissist, and fell for someone who hurt her as well. However the ending shows her triumph by taking her pain and turning it into art. Or hanging it up like a frame, as a reminder to not make the same mistake by falling into the narcissist’s trap.
To begin picturing this visually, I first created a very vague storyboard that just pushed all my ideas into 2 pages. This is what it looks like roughly.
After sketching this rough template out, I did end up finalizing a few scenes of my animation, but also made changes to some. I was still slightly confused about how long it would be and where I would add cuts in scenes, versus transitions of one thing turning into another. I do love creating transitions that have one thing become another like a teardrop turning into a plate. I realized how much I loved transitions by using so many in my previous stop motion animation. I created an animatic that is shown below to layout my scenes in a more orderly manner, to help me visualize and start thinking of the timing and duration of my animation.
After finalizing a few scenes, I also decided to run a few tests of the scenes like the girl rolling in bed to show her uncomfortable state (relating to the “nightmare” ) and the father throwing a plate at the wall to portray the violence that the little girl witnessed growing up at home. (parental figure in the story)
Going further into my final, I definitely love the rough look I got in the tests I did, however I am still thinking of the exact style I want for my final.
My ideas currently are
– real life photos for backgrounds and digital drawing layers on top.
-using a very minimal color palette / realistic skin color?? still a little confused about that
-making all the faces realistic?
