For our next animation assignment, Joy and I decided to work together. We both had an interest in using archive or other public collection-based images, and decided to gather a few that piqued our interests.
Here were a few of my favorite images:
It seemed that we both had an interest in stories in which the moon featured prominently. Joy also had an interest in looking at stories that were from non-Western traditions. We began to explore a few online story collections that pulled from folk tales around the world. (A few collections were GREAT, and I mean to keep revisiting them: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html & https://www.librarything.com/).
We found a few stories about the moon that appealed to us:
- A Turkish story in which a character tries to rescue the moon from a well.
- An African story in which a character builds a stone stool to transport himself to the moon.
- Chinese story about Chang’e who drinks an elixir and is transported to the moon.
We decided build these stories into our piece: our primary character would make three attempts to go to the moon, succeeding on their third attempt.
“A Trip to the Moon” also served as a point of inspiration:
Initially, we considered making our primary character a young boy, but realizing that animation would allow us to be more playful, switched to raccoon as hero.
As we talked more about the story we imagined, we thought about doubling up on heros: what if two raccoons, very different in disposition but alike in passions, attempt the same journey.
We developed a storyboard of such a story, viewable here: A Tale of Two Raccoons (a working title). A few excerpts below:
We also had to locate (or create) an 2D character and prep the asset for class (essentially breaking down the moving components into different Photoshop layers). Joy and I decided to each draw a raccoon!
Here’s mine below:
