3 Minute Film Research

  

21st September

Here is the start of my blog.

Over the summer we were asked to come up with three potential ideas for our three minute film. After sifting through dozens of fairy tales, nursery rhymes newspaper headlines, folklore and fables i came to find one that caught my eye.
Japanese/chinese folklore is one of the most interesting and unique styles of storytelling. The ancient urban legends are great to read as they're from a time before westernisation, which is a brilliant place to start for some fresh and original work. Although some of the stories are fairly random, i found that they all had good storylines. One that caught my eye was ‘Taketori Monogatari’ The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.

The summarised story is that a bamboo cutter falls in love with a princess from the moon. She lands on earth and shortly after is taken back by moon guards. The bamboo cutter is greatly saddened and decides to try and make communication with her again by finding the highest mountain, and burning a letter, in hope the smoke reaches the sky, and to her.

I really liked this story and wanted to make my own adaptation, and alter it to a story i think could be more relatable to. And this is what i came up with:

'The Mouse and the Star'

My original idea was to have a star falling to earth, and befriending a mouse. They fall in love and soon after the star gets lifted back into the sky, leaving the mouse alone on earth again. The mouse feels really upset for loosing his friend, and tries to get into the sky to see the star again. Its new year, and the mouse looks into the sky at his favourite star, he watches the festive rockets blast off into the sky and burst into glittering stars, and then he gets an idea. He ties himself to a rocket and takes off into the air. It blows up into a thousand glittering pieces. Next to the star he loved, another appears.

I decided that because my story was oriental originally that it might be good to stylise it that way. I looked into different oriental styles.

I really like these images because of the use of colour. It convays a mood but also keeps it oriental. I like the overlay of detail in white also, and the paper like look. This is art i found called Panda Revolution in 'Xiabosic blog.'  I looked into more traditional chinese art work and i found this image by 'zhoa yui chui' done on silk .

I like the pale colours used, and the watery look. Its a very simple style. Here are a few more images from post imperial war times, by and artist names Mu Qi 

It conforms to the papery look and the very pale strokes.

I decied that from looking at these pictures a mouse wouldn't be the best animal to represent a chinese look. From looking at a couple of images, the most commonly used animals in chinese art are the panda and the crane. 
This made it difficult to incorporate into my story, as cranes can fly, and pandas are too big for rockets. So i decided to use some creative licence, and depend of the audiences suspension of disbelief and make my main character not a mouse, but a very small panda.

Rough character designs 

Here are a couple of my rough design ideas for my panda, just done sketchy and in pen.
I wanted his character to be obviously a mix of the lazy gluttony of a panda, but also have an element of hyperactivity. A bit of an excitable character.

 

Character development

A couple of rendered out design ideas, i wanted to keep the designs simple and play around with markings to make my character distinctive. 

Initial Character design

Heres my first character design sheet for my protagonist, Poco the panda. I kept the design simple and cute. Because he was smaller then other pandas- i gave him a slight toddler physique like a bent forward back, short legs, heavy head, small arms. This could make the character more relatable to by a younger audience.








  Sally The Star
I didn't want to spend to much time designing sally the star. She's going to be very small, and her features aren't going to be very distinguishable, i just wanted her to be a very clear star shape so the audience understand what she is. 

Concept illustration

I designed this image to get the mood of the animation. 

I want the backgrounds to be almost paramount in conveying the emotions of the character. I did the cloudy sky to symbolise the barriers, i used pale and dark blues to show the mood of loneliness. I made the main panda character small to show the vastness of the sky, and the moon bright to show a goal. I injected chinese characters and meaning to refer to the traditional art i found, and the colour overlays over main images that add a little bit extra i think.

More detailed story.

Scene: Ext Night time. 

On a grassy hill.

Panda sat on top of a hill looking up at the stars, whilst e....nomming a bamboo stick.

A star flys across the sky, and falls to earth. It crashes in a field beneath the hill Panda is sitting on. Panda lazily rolls down the hill to investigate. He slowly approaches the scene, treading cautiously through a dusty mist. Eventually dust clears, revealing a tiny, glittering star. The star groggily looks up at Panda, who looks back in amazement. Panda carefully reaches down and plucks the star out of the dirt. He holds the star at eye level analysing it intensely. Suddenly, Panda throws the star into his mouth and tries to chew. After discovering the star is definitely not edible, he spits it out and carries the star back up the hill. 

A friendship begins.

Their friendship grows day by day. Together, they dance and sing, play games and watch the stars every night. Until one night an ominous beam of light shines down on the star, dragging it back up to the sky. Panda holds on, and tries to use his weight to pull the star back down, but the light is too strong. Panda watches as it lifts the star higher and higher until nothing but a small speck could be seen in the stars place. As days and nights pass, Panda watches the sky in hope for the return of his new friend. He decides to climb a tree in order to get closer to the sky. But he is not high enough, so he goes in search for a ladder. He soon builds a large tower of domestic items in an attempt to get closer to the star, but no matter what he does he cant get high enough.
It's New Year's Eve and feeling defeated, Panda sits back on the hill, gazing at the celebrations. As the rockets and fireworks erupt into glittering stars, he has an idea. He travels down into the town and grabs a box of fireworks displayed in front of a shop. Panda straps himself to the biggest one and sets it alight. The rocket zooms into the air, up past the houses, higher than the hill, until he himself becomes nothing but a speck to the people below. Suddenly the speck bursts into a ball of glitter. As the glitter falls, it reveals a new star, twinkling happily alongside Panda's lost friend.
The End