HUM 203: The World in Motion, Animation in Theory and Practice

Assignment 1

Assignment 2

Final project

This animation was created frame by frame in Photoshop using a tablet, then imported into Flash and set to music. It centers around a constant protagonist, the little girl in the blue dress. However, its progression as it follows her actions is less about a single narrative than about the world of narrative possibilities. The first segment is about one possibility: the little girl rides a bus, drops her teddy bear’s hat, gets off the bus, and finally, melancholically, discovers this after the bus has traveled beyond her reach. The shots are rhythmic, the character’s actions predictable and archetypal of the elegiac mode, the proper ending point obvious and its emotional message clearly defined.

Yet at this point the camera travels back to give us a second narrative possibility. The girl transforms into a violent creature with superhuman powers over her environment, and her environment in turn becomes fluid and unpredictable. For a few seconds, we depart from the realm of the formulaic for the unexpected, the pseudo-real for the fantastic. However, which is more real, if the second narrative has the ability to surprise us--or perhaps, which would we rather represented a true reality, if the second narrative world is the one in which the little girl retrieves her bear’s hat?

The world of narrative possibilities is truly vast, and all too often we unthinkingly narrow it down the most constraining fraction. This fact holds true for our personal, internal narratives about the “real” world, too.