I am doing an assignment currently that requires me to make an animation to a 30 second portion of a song of choice. It has to tell a story, whether literal or abstract, and while most people’s idea of a story is probably something long and convoluted with a beginning, middle, end, with complications and resolutions as we were taught from a young age, it’s actually much simpler than that.
My lecturer explained to the class that while many people claim that they can’t write a narrative or that they aren’t creative enough to tell a story, they are wrong. Story telling is one of the most fundamental skills and characteristics in human beings. Most of our social interactions with other people consists of stories being told and shared. Even the most simplest of stories like ‘I just ate the best sandwich’.
Not only this but the brain simply already possesses the innate ability to tell and create stories, as even when we aren’t conscious we are doing exactly that. There is no body who doesn’t know how to tell stories because we all tell stories when we dream.
The thing that stuck out to me in this talk my lecturer gave us is when he described what we’re creating as a ‘thirty second dream’. I have decided to look at all things I create as dreams now because I think that is just beautiful.
He also mentioned briefly about how our dreams reveal a lot about ourselves through symbols, and that we should try and implement this into our creative work when determining the theme of something. We should ask ‘what does this reveal?’ ‘What’s the meaning?’ That’s what determines the theme.
In everything we create we have to always write some kind of statement or reflection answering the question ‘why?’. It often receives quite a bit of complaint and many expressions of contempt, but I think it is extremely important. The question of why I’m making something is almost more important than the process of making it in the first place, as without that ‘why’, there is simply no true motivation behind making it, no responsibility to take from it, and no goal to work towards, and without any of these things, the project has been assigned no meaning. And without meaning and purpose, where is going, and what will it actually become?
To finalise, I would like to share my 30 second dream that is the end result of this assignment. I created this using a pixilation technique (stop motion animation of people), with 2D animation added on top in Photoshop. I wanted to add the 2D lines to add an element of fantasy and imagination to the narrative. Overall I’m very happy with how it turned out 🙂
Lauren Kathleen 