Storyline/ narrative reflections

When completing this primer task, the main thing I learnt was the amount of elements you need to consider when creating a narrative, as in the plot alone, you need to aware of all the characters’ motives, and how and why the story moves in a certain direction. There was also a lot more research than I anticipated, but I felt this enhanced the stories I could create, and the type of mood I could create from the research on genres and settings. Collecting all the research behind the artefacts was something I particularly enjoyed, as it gave more depth to the objects, and by knowing the context of the artefacts, it was easier to create more interesting storylines that could also contrast or make use of that context.

However, I did find it difficult to combine the two artefacts in a story/ imagined environment where both the objects and their contexts added to the narrative; I found it easy to build a story from the context of one artefact, but it was hard to combine it with the context of the other artefact to make a coherent storyline. Consequently, in some of my ideas, it was clear that one of the artefacts had more presence/ worked with its context better than the other artefact did. I tried to resolve this when creating the 1 minute narrative, but I felt I could have pushed the use of the ear trumpet further. Despite this, it did lead me to think about a medical theme, which led me to choose a plague doctor as a main character. This also led me to choose an overall medieval theme to the story, but reflecting on it now, I think it also would have been interesting to place the plague doctor with the ear trumpet in a modern/ different historical setting. This would be dependant on the mood I am to create, as if I were to do something more light-hearted, a contrasting setting may be fitting, but if I am leaning towards the horror/ gothic genre, maybe placing it in a medieval context would work well.

The reason I chose to build a story upon idea 4 was due to the complexity of the character that was implied - I liked this idea of setting up a character as an antagonist, only to reveal its less antagonistic motives, and create sympathy for them. However, I did get stuck on how to place the ear trumpet artefact into that story, as unlike with the spirit belum, I did not have the option of turning it into a character, and had to find a use for an object in my story. In the end, I managed to relate it to its context as its other function as a conversation tube, and had it directly interact with the my other chosen artefact through a character. The overall genre of my planned animation turned out to be horror/ gothic, which surprised me, as that was not my original direction - due to the contrast I wanted to create between the spirit as a villain and the spirit as a protective parental figure, it became more horror-orientated. Despite this not being my original intention, I think it was an interesting direction to take, especially due to the twist at the end that reveals complexity within the supernatural antagonist.

'Give it Away' project

Confirm copying