What makes a successful story?

A successful story is different for everyone. What one person likes in a story, another person may dislike.
However I believe that a good story is made with a twist and cliff-hanger, a story that we can connect to emotionally and one that we can imagine in our heads as if we were watching a film.
Structure wise it needs a beginning, middle and end but not necessarily in that order. It doesn't have to be a thousand words or just like Ernest Hemingway a 6 word sentence.

Photo 1 (top left): I decided to take this picture as there was a plant/tree in front of paper.

Photo 2 (top right): For this photo I shot new healthy grass in front of of a dead leafless tree

Photo 3 (bottom left): I wanted to show old against new for this photo.

In this lesson, we concentrated more on focus and the brightness of the images. By going outside around the University for a couple of hours, we were able to experiment with the cameras. However, I prefer to stick with darker images than images with correct brightness or being too bright. Here are a few of my favorites from this session.

Assignment one

Firstly I would like to talk about where my idea for my storyboard came from. I read several interviews of Huey Lewis talking about how he suffered from a disorder of the inner ear called Meniere's disease and that he was becoming deaf. In Vanity fair he states “This is now a year and eight months, and it’s awful,” Lewis said in the interview. “I can’t hear music. It’s hard enough to hear speech. But music is impossible. The music is cacophony for me and now my hearing fluctuates. I can actually get better sometimes where I think, Oh, my gosh, I can almost sing.’ and “I try not to let it get me down,” he said. “In the first two months of this, I was suicidal. I can honestly share that with you. I thought, Shit, I’m just going to commit suicide. I actually contemplated my demise. You know, like pills. I figured pills were the easiest way to go.”

Huey Lewis is not the only musician that has become deaf after years of being on stage, Ozzy Osbourne, Neil Young, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend are also only a few that have symptoms of severe hear loss .
I wanted to take this interview and see how it would have been if sadly Huey Lewis had took his own life.For the visuals, I wanted it to be black and white photography. When you lose the love of your life your world becomes colorless and I wanted to represent that. The scenes where it seems extremely dark are scenes of judgement, loneliness and pure despair. I also used natural lighting instead of artificial.

I used mainly long shots and medium long shots as I wanted to give the impression that you are doubting if you know and can put your self in the protagonist’s shoes. The only time I used close up shots was to represent moments of pleasure (for example the protagonist playing his guitar, his guitar is everything to him so a close shot would show the union of him and his guitar.)
For the intro shot, I wanted to show how famous and successful the protagonist was. So I took a few woodstock images and golden and diamond disks from other artists.

References: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2019/12/huey-lewis-hearing-loss-music

Stop Motion is a form of animation that is captured one frame at time, with physical objects that are moved between frames.

The most well known stop motion film is The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) which was directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton. The film took three years to make however the stop motion part only took eighteen months. The stop-motion musical had 24 frames to a second, meaning they had to pose characters 24 times for each second of the completed film. And for the main character Jack, there were more than 400 different heads were made and then used.

For the class exercise, I used Imotion. I drew a little dog and a ball. I wanted to recreate a dog being filled with joy about catching a ball. In each frame I tried to move his tail to show that he was wagging and his head to show that he was following the bounce of the ball.

Assignment Two

For my second assignment, I have decided to go with the Greek myth of Icarus. Icarus was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus. Together they attempt to escape from Crete by flying with wings that Daedalus would make.Sadly, Icarus wouldfly closer to the sun and his wings would dissolved under the scorching sun and he would fall into the sea and drown.

I like the idea of keeping to a color scheme, and the color red is perfect especially for the sky. Red symbolizes blood, anger and danger. Also black which symbolizes death is also perfect as I want to warn the viewer about what's going to happen without them realizing.

For the wings, I want to base them off pheonix or eagle wings. I would prefer to stick with Pheonix wings as a pheonix represents rebirth and since the area of the sea where he fell took the name Icarian Sea after him, while a nearby island was named Icaria. So in a way it's like a rebirth.

I bought two drawing figurines for Icarus and Daedalus, some tissue paper for the wings, sea and maybe for the sky (I'm not sure if I want to paint the sky yet). I have started to create the set with cardboard boxes and I want to make it look as if it is really happening in Greece, to do that I will be making buildings.

Influences

Known to be one of the greatest stop motion animator, Ray Harryhausen would make Jason and The Argonauts in 1963. His contribution to the art of stop-motion animation was recognised with a special Academy Award in 1992, a special BAFTA in 2010 and a lifetime achievement award from the Visual Effects Society in 2011.

One of my favorite directors of all time, David Lynch, created "Six men getting sick (six times)" in 1967 when he was a student. It started off as a painting then with help from a bit of wind he saw movement and decided to create a stop motion film. he film was shot in an abandoned room, with Lynch's 16 mm camera taped to the bottom of a dressing table, and single-frame shots were taken while Lynch animated his painting. Lynch constructed a sculptured screen measuring 6 ft×10 ft, on which the final film would be projected.

Pre-production

For the wings, I decided to go with plain white tissue paper as it contrasted better with the background. Also In a way it symbolizes the innocence of them wanting to fly away. I teared up the tissue paper and bunched it up and glued it to the black bone. I made two versions, one with the wings up and the other down to give the effect of them flying.

Instead of using tissue paper I decided to paint the background, like this I was able to use different variance of colors and to do close ups, especially when Icarus flies closer to the sun.

Music choice

Known best from Requiem for a dream, Lux Aeterna was a great choice for my project. I love the build up and the sadness of this song.

Final

What I learnt doing this process, working with fire is dangerous and you have to work quick. So a lot of my last few scenes were very still and quick.