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Storytelling Through Computer Animation

Storytelling Through Computer Animation

Assignment A12: Diving into the structure of your story

Objectives

Effective Storytelling:

Now that we have practice with some of the techniques for 3D animation, we need to focus more deeply on improving our ability to use 3D animaiton effectively in the art of storytelling.

When you’re concieving of a story, a critically important step is to create your premise.

What is the premise of a story?
Thre premise is basically the prpose or central idea of the story.  It is an a situation which makes people want to watch further.  It is often an open question in the form of ‘what would happen if… ?‘

Robert McKee, in his book Story, calls the premise

"the daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything is possible."

- Story, Robert McKee

The following is a short video on storytelling by Ira Glass, the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life a show in which stories are typically told as first-person narratives:



In this video, Ira Glass discusses two building blocks which he considers essential to effective storytelling:
  1. The premise/anecdote/sequence of actions; a story in its purest form (raising questions from the beginning which keep people interested.)
  2. The moment of reflection.

    He says that you need to get both, the story to come together - and be larger than the sum of its parts...
On DVDs "deleted scenes" are often included. They can be interesting to watch.

In this video, Ira Grass dicusses the importance of time and editing and being willing to eliminate "crap."    Thinking about these scenes from the perspective of the director, one can imagine that they must be hard to omit... They take time and money to make... Yet, the director ultimately decides to leave them out... Why?

If we talk about revision, we may want to think about how we can be effective with Alice in any additonal features we have added to a class in order that we can use those features easily in any Alice world.

Exporting Classes

In an earlier class, we built an animation on an unwelcome visitor. In today's class, we will expand this animation.

The bird that I started with was the bluebird, which did not have a flapping method.  So, I created a flapping method.  I also changed its color and added a bird sound file.

I then saved this modified bird object as an object:  Janbird.a2c (right-click to download)
Here is the mp3 file with the bird song that I used:  janbirdsound.mp3 (right-click to download)

So, in general after modyfying an object by making changes like writing class-level methods and/or adding object-level sounds, you can then export an object and import it into another Alice World or into the same world in order to make multiple instances of the object. So, for example, we can then add a second bird with ease.


Your task: 

In this assignment, you are to create a longer story with the following:
For the Alice potion, do the following:
 In your artist's statement answer the following questions:
Submit the following files:   
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