Devising Narrative Structures: Day 2
Another great session with Paul and the class today. We began by finishing off yesterday’s exercise in storytelling without dialogue or text. Most stories are driven by language, but what if you drive the process through visuals? Based on the Aristotelian structure, the project was to come up with a story told visually in 6 frames. This following would make more sense with visual examples, which I don’t have. But I can outline one of the examples that was given us.
1. Set the scene containing a character, with maximum suggestion using minimum of imagery. (Drawing skills were not important: stick figures would do.)
Sad man sits alone in empty room with tiny scrawny Christmas Tree.
2. Second character enters and establishes a relationship with the first character. The second character must have what Paul Wells calls ‘animation quality’ – i.e. it must have or do something that could not be achieved if you were shooting this story as live action.
Santa Clause flies in through the door. The sad man is startled out of his chair.
3. Something happens between the two characters. An exchange takes place that develops the narrative.
Santa gives the sad man a wrapped gift.
4. One or both characters has an emotional reaction to what just happened.
As Santa leaves, the sad man is so happy and grateful he is kneeling on the floor, praying, with tears of gratitude.
5. Preparation for the conclusion. Something happens that looks back on the foreshadowing that occurred earlier. This frame may be used for suspense/postponement. Or it may extend the nature of the exchange or emotional reaction.
Formerly sad, but now excited man starts unwrapping the gift.
6. Conclusion of the implied relationship that was set up through the exchange. Revelation of that which was foreshadowed.
Sad man is in back in his chair, and back to being sad. He holds a badminton racquet in his hand. He’s assembled the gift: A badminton set with racquets, net, shuttlecock. But he has no one to play with.
Sounds simple, right? IT IS NOT SIMPLE. It was amazingly hard to come up with a story in 6 frames, using no dialogue, based on an exchange between two characters, in which what happens at the end is set up and foreshadowed earlier. And that isn’t just plain stupid. After 9 attempts I came up with a story that involved a confident seed, and a malevolent mower.
Some other points from yesterday:
Philip Parker’s Creative Matrix of a screenplay contains 6 free-floating components:
theme, story, form, genre, style, and plot
At any time any two can be linked for emphasis. E.g. genre (western) gets redetermined by style (comedy) in Blazing Saddles. And gets redetermined by theme (gay love) in Brokeback Mountain.
But Paul Wells thinks the matrix of an animation is different, because the mechanisms are different, because the whole economy of a film is embedded in early choices. Unlike live action filming, with animation you can’t make a whole bunch of material and edit it down. It’s just too labor intensive. You have to plan major choices ahead. The choice of technique, to begin with, will have a huge effect on subsequent choices. 2D stop motion using collage? Claymation? Flash?
Animation’s inherent ability to pass on metaphor and symbol invites people in. We are more inclined to watch a short piece about an anthropomorphized lamp playing with a ball, than we are to watch a similar piece involving a child playing with a ball. The audience immediately asks questions in a way that makes the work accessible.
The language of animation includes:
- Metamorphosis – The ability to facilitate the change from one form to the next without edit. This generates a different model of storytelling.
- Condensation – the maximum degree of suggestion with the minimum of imagery. E.g. focused gestures suggest particular things, and drive narrative precision.
- Anthropomorphism - the imposition of human traits on animals, objects, and environments. Such characters often take on dominant traits. E.g Goofy is the empathetic amateur at sports. This gives a very direct way of understanding human behavior, by abstracting it into the non-human.
- Fabrication – the physical and material creation of imagery, figures, and spaces. Built worlds create their own limits and currencies. These limits make for a clarity of impact of the story.
- Penetration (term from John Hallis in the 1940s) – the visualization of psychological, physical, and technical ‘interiors’. E.g. animation can clarify something extremely complicated and mysterious, such as the workings of the human body. It can also easily represent dream, memory, and imagination. Can represent primal dynamics.
- Symbolic association – the use of abstract visual signs and their related meanings. E.g. Felix the Cat pulls off his tail and it becomes a banjo that he plays. Or he pulls down two castle turrets, scoops up clods in them, and gives on to a lady he is wooing.
- Sound – the illusionist stimulus and catalyst. Unlike film, where sound is driven by the primacy of dialogue and/or music, with animation you start with no diagetic sound. Whatever choices you make about sound will support the telling of the story.
Okay, we also talked about sources (prompts) modes of association, and the ’6 panel theater’ exercise was begun. But if I write all that out it will take me all night.
TODAY we talked about satisfaction. And about the 3-act structure (related to the 6-frame theater). Also Jacques Rancière‘s “ideaism” and “matterism”. “Regimes of visibility” and “Planes of intelligibility”. But that was only briefly, and pretty soon we were back on the ground in Paul Wells’ more straightforward analysis or what’s what. Then we discussed the 5 dominant models of narrative and looked at examples of a couple of them.
1. multiple perspectives of a single incident
2. list-led related events to a core topic
3. transitional narratives based on metamorphoses and associations
4. Single Scenario (e.g. John and Karen by Matthew Walker)
5. Character-led vignettes (e.g. Harvie Krumpet by Adam Elliot)
(John and Karen was wonderful. The clip on Walker’s site is not the whole piece, unfortunately. Harvie Krumpet was overambitious and required more empathy than it delivered. Was it’s Oscar win a pity vote, because it’s about marginalized people?)
Scene from John and Karen, by Matthew Walker
THEN in a separate session, we discussed the very term animation, what it meant, what it includes. And that it is used to describe such a huge range of cultural production that maybe it has become meaningless. We also discussed its relationship to the term ‘cartoon’. And its relationship with art. I knew there was some contention in these areas, but I had no idea how much.
I suggested we revisit the root of the word, ‘anima’ – the soul, suggesting that to be animated is to be ‘ensouled’. Live action figures move under their own volition. Sure they’re following a script, but they are propelling themselves. They have cognition, sentience, and so on. When a figure (whether human or not) is animated, it is given qualities that make it seem to come alive. But it is not moving under its own volition. So animation is creating the illusion of aliveness, of ensoulment (Not meant in the Catholic sense, of course).
And we discussed that cartoons are not opposed to animation, as some fine-art animators think. Cartoons are rather a subset of animation. What defines that subset, though? The jury is still out on that. We got to a point where we were considering whether animation as an umbrella term could even include live action. Huh. Interesting idea.
Also, at what point does one draw the line? Is a CGI’d explosion in a live-action film animation? Do we still want to make a distinction between hand-crafted animation and that done digitally? And if my definition is correct, that animation is the illusion of ‘ensouling’ something to make it move and seem alive, then should I include the life-size animatronic Santa Clause I saw outside a thrift store on my way home? He was heavily dressed in the brilliant evening sun, waving his stiff mechanical arm back and forth. Next to him was a female mannequin sprawled in a pose that was probably supposed to be sexy. Together they were a splash of red velvet and white fake fur, doing their repetitive unseasonal dance for passers by. The mannequin stared at me through the bus window, and for a creepy moment they seemed to be really alive.