WHO: I am working alone, because this is a very personal memory and I would like to be the only one “manipulating” it
WHAT: I will be creating mostly everything from construction paper (hospital room, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, a needle for shots) but the people (me, the nurse) will be drawn with black ink on plain white paper
WHEN: Now until…the deadline…?
WHERE: I will be shooting in my room, most likely by the window because the setting is morning time, and I would like to use natural light.
HOW: I will be photographing with a high-quality camera that I will borrow from the EQC, since my iPhone 6 is breaking down and the camera sucks. I will be creating 3D things from the construction paper, so there will be multiple angles.
My stop-motion animation is going to be a recreation of the moment I first woke up on the first morning of the three days I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when I was 15. Everything about it was unpleasant- I had been forced by my psychiatrist to go to the hospital because she was “concerned” about my well-being, and my parents had to drop me off right after my little brother’s 8th birthday dinner. The whole build up to me getting admitted was just fucking awful, since there was so much tension at the birthday dinner and I felt so bad for my brother. I woke up on an uncomfortable bed, cold, with a nurse sticking a needle in my arm. She hadn’t even bothered to wake me up before- I was awoken by shock because I am extremely sensitive to touch and am also terrified of needles. I remember wondering where I was, then realizing everything that had happened and crying while the nurse proceeded with putting a bandage on and leaving quietly without saying anything. For this animation, I would like to manipulate the shot that was sucking the blood out of my veins to a concept of the needle sucking all of the negativity and misery that was going on in my life at the time. I am planning for the whole video to be about a minute long, and relatively linear until the shot goes in, time rewinds and instead of crying I am feeling happy again. There will be no narration, just music (I have a few songs in mind; music I listened to during that time). At the moment I am not completely sure if I want to have more than one song playing, because I want the entire video to have the same vibe from beginning to end (music-wise; in other words, even though there are two separate moods being conveyed in the video, I want the whole thing to be tied together by the same sad(ish) song, since at the end, it isn’t really a happy story anyway). I am using construction paper and simplistic drawings because I want the aesthetic to be very childish and minimal, since I was pretty young when this happened. The purpose of this project is to portray how the hospital (which was incredibly expensive) did absolutely nothing to my depression at the time- in fact, I felt more suicidal than ever during my three days there. I had to recover on my own, and in order to do that I had to maintain an incredibly difficult level of self-control to make it seem to the hospital that I was perfectly fine so that I could get out. I was not fine, but I remember having to put up a façade every time I saw a doctor or social worker, and I told the same story every time. I was sick when I came home, but because I didn’t want to go back there, I forced myself to become “normal”. The video ends in a city scene because during those days I thought about how my dream of going to school in a big city seemed so unattainable, because that was my rock bottom.
MATERIALS: construction paper, printer paper, drawing material and a high-quality camera
STORYBOARD: A LIST
- All black (I am sleeping, dreaming)
- Clouds moving
- Clouds start raining
- Rain drops falling slowly (showing the movement)
- Scene goes from my feet to the top of my head [Me, I am blue, head in my knees]
- Rain drops hit the top of my head
- Full body, still head in knees, raining on me
- Zoom out slowly
- Raining, my body is blue and small
- Sees hospital room
- Close up of my eyes closing tightly
- Needle is on the table
- I look over
- I see the needle on the table
- Take needle from table
- Stares at it
- Puts it down next to me on bed
- Close up of scar from the shot
- My face, looking down at my arm
- Takes needle
- Puts it into where I just got the shot
- Tube fills up with blue
- I become less and less blue
- I take the needle out, it is filled with blue
- Puts it down
- Lays back down
- I am now human color, no longer blue
- Eyes close
