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Reimagining and Changes

Abigail Lamb
Mar 6, 2019
4 min read

Reflecting after the new year and talking with Jared, it was decided that my film was not what I wanted it to be and to me personally had strayed too far away from my original intention for the film. In this post I'm going to run through all the thinking I have has previously on this film, outline the important factors to me personally and then end with a new proposal for the film.

The First Pass

When I started this year I wanted to return to a story I had worked on several years ago but hadn't finished and hadn't worked on since. The idea hadn't really left my head since then and it was still a narrative I was interested in taking forward, although, in the state it was in at the time I didn't think it was right. The concept was complicated and proving hard to flesh out the way I intended but I hoped by reimagining the narrative I could bring it to a point where I was happy with it.

I began on this narrative as a response to EIFF's short film competition stimulus which was 71. The concept was about an inventor and their grandchild trying to repopulate the skies with stars after they start to die out. The undercurrent to the story was the relationship between the 2 and how the grandchild looked up to the grandparent. The issue I had with the story was that I didn't want to kill the grandfather off in order to have the grandchild step into his shoes. It felt too National Treasure to me. It did come to mind at the beginning of this year though as a starting point.

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Here you can see that I originally planned for this to be with animals and not people. I've also given you the initial rough storyboard as reference. It doesnt have the grandfather character in it because I felt like it was too long if I included those scenes too. However I did write a couple of scripts with the grandfather in them:

Eventually this story was something I wanted to come back to and to find a way to make. I stripped it down and thought about the parts I wanted to keep. That left me with the elements I went into the first semester with:

Inspiration
Family
stars/moon

It coincided well with the upcoming anniversary of the moon landing and so I thought it would be a good way to go. I began reworking the idea however it didn't come together very well. That was all the work you have seen in previous posts from the first semester.

I felt as though the version I was working on last semester had strayed too far from inspiration and admiration for another person and into love and dealing with separation. Which I haven't ever had to go through so I have very little personal experience in this area, but I have lots of experience being inspired by things.

I understand that inspiration is not as easy a topic to convey through animation as love is but striking a balance when introducing complicated emotions is something I am interested in as a film maker. Jared told me that animators paint in broad strokes when it comes to conveying things and this often leaves little space for subtly of emotions. So I feel that this semester is going to be treated as an exercise in animated subtlety and emotions. I've always been the kind of person to challenge something and this year I'd like to figure out how to use animation to say something subtle.

I've decided to take a more abstract approach to the idea of inspiration and hope that allows my characters to say things more blatantly through larger expressions. Instead of the subtle facial expressions that live action characters use to express themselves.

So with all that said let's talk about the new direction!

When I returned in January I opted to strip back the narrative and find the core of it again so I could build it back up in a better form.

Inspiration
Someone who is inspired
abstract

Jared gave me a couple of books to read: Raymond Quenean's Exercise in style and 99 ways to tell a story by Matt Madden. Both similar concepts. The same story told multiple ways and they got me thinking about the other ways I could tell the same story as before but hopfuly find a version that works this time. In reality I thought of very few versions before I arrived on the version I loved.

I began but did not finish a version where the paintings and output of the painter were present and the painter was not. It was just a quick test at what arranging the shots to have the astronaut and the paintings mirror one another would be like: I boarded enough to know I didn't like it.

Then I also boarded a quick version from the point of view of the moon, however I hit the same issues as I did initially where I didn't know how to resolve the conflict. It was a kinda cute concept but it reminded me a lot of dissonance and I didn't really want to parallel them all too much cause I was already working with lots of similar concepts. From this I thought to myself that the astronaut might as well not be in the film, so that's what I tried next. But it just came together in my head a bit better so I decided to script it out since I was thinking about it and didn't want to miss anything that I was thinking about.