Story Development for Animation

To continue where we left off in our previous lesson, we focus on looking at more types of story development methods, as well as being grouped up to form our own miniature story.

Something I found to be truly inspirational was looking at Christopher Booker's "7 Basic Plots" which is a book that shows all the different types of film genres and displays them on a 'happy to sad' scale on how the character should feel during each major action in the movie. Lets take this example for a comedy and compare it to a tragedy:

As you can see from looking at the comedy the characters have a normal attitude and are just living the life of regular people like all of us, then their lives spiral down in a humorous way for the viewer until they reach some form of escape from the downward spiral and are able to reach their normal life again. Because of this we feel like as if the characters have had a small gain towards the end of this movie and it makes us enjoy the ending to witness their resolution.

However, if we compare this to tragedy then we can see quite a big difference in how the chart is laid out: we see the characters go from sadness to happiness in a short span of time which would be great for the character, but as a viewer we already know that this will only come to punish them in the end, and so it does as the chart decreases in happiness for the character until by the end of the movie we see the character in prison by the end of the movie.

After looking at these different story plots it was time to be grouped up into fours and write our own miniature story with some basic prompts we came up with in the chat before. By going back and using Dan Harmon's story circle, this is what we came up with:

"A parrot relaxes onto the beach as he sees a plastic bag flying in the air. As he stares at the plastic bag it flies into his face. As he gets stuck, he unintentionally dances inside the plastic bag in an attempt to get out.

He hears in the distance a human coming in hope to help him get out of the plastic bag, but instead it is a litter picker who throws the plastic bag with the parrot in the bin.

As he gets out of the plastic bag he notices the glorious amount of food inside the bin and crafts a hammock from the plastic bag inside of the bin and decides to relax over the rubbish instead."

Looking back at Booker's 7 plots I personally believe that this story follows a more comedic approach as we can see the normal life the parrot had at the beginning slowly spiral down until he's in the bin, then lives back into arguably a better life by enjoying the amount of food he has in the bin.