Today, this storytelling and narrative with Tessa (Hotessa), the module leader. She is going to assess us, on two tasks. One of the criteria is to upload everything you do in the workshop each week to your website and label it, comment and thoughts about it. For me, I like to annotate stuff all the time so, having this website is a plus for me. The first criteria is 80% of the final grade for this semester. For me to succeed on this module, doing annotations it’s important in class, having Tessas power point presentation, helps but it’s not essential.
For the second criteria it’s a presentation of your final outcome. We will present our work with comments and our thoughts. Having to present my work gives me anxiety just think of it, I get too nervous when presenting, also I stutter a lot. So, being assessed for doing a presentation, will absolutely kill me. But I haven’t lost hope yet, since Tessa makes us present each week our work that we did each week. I believe if I practice my pronunciation and make a work that I’m confident enough. This criteria is going to be 20% assessed, it’s fine if I mess up a little. It’s still important to give my all. For now, it’s week one so thinking of the final outcome is unnecessary.
This week we started by learning what’s the difference between story and narrative.
Story is knowing all the materials, peoples, places and events. Then restructure in different ways.
Narrative is to make up your own story using different material and trying to form it.
Furthermore, we saw a talk from Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories explaining how story normally are structure.
The art of Flounder very interesting, since there is no dialogue. Not exactly a dialogue as in speaking, but as animator we are giving the ability to tell a story even without talking, we have the speciality of telling a story using images, colour, audio and forms. Seeing this makes me think a child made this, since the art looks child made, but then it makes you realise that this story goes beyond then just the normal child like art. Flounder, tells a story of a couple that have a poor life, until they found a fish that grand wishes. I see the poor life as people see themselves in real life, hoping to someday they can catch an opportunity, in the sea that we call life. The wish granting fish was a big point of the story, since the fish normally represent good fortune or good luck. In this film there’s a lot to unpack, but I wanted to talk more about the other film.
The second film is called “BlueBarry TwinTrash Short Film”. This was quite a funny one, I like the comedy, how goofy it is and how it animated. I see how someone doing this had fun doing it.
Now, after this videos came the fun part, after all this module is called storytelling for a reason. Tess gave an assignment, of writing our own story just using an image as our guide, we had to make a group of four, then we would be split into two. In my group were people that I never worked with (Dani, Ava and “John or Chalee”). So, the groups were made and then we started to brainstorm ideas.
We (the four of us) came up with a girl having to deal with trauma or didn’t want to go to sleep and the clock stroke midnight some awful would happen. Talking through it we came up with an interesting draft. After some ideas we were split into pairs, I was pair with Dani. We decided to take some ideas from our groups idea. So, we began doing an amazing story, Dani and I had so much ideas that we couldn’t put it on paper. Nevertheless, we wrote about a transgender girl going though past trauma, that she needs to overcome. Each time this character overcame a trauma she would gain a puzzle piece, where she could unlock a door to a place of sanctuary, where she can be at peace.