My animation

In creating this animation we intended on taking occurrences from life and exaggerating them for humor. Surprise! Surprise? is a quirky mystery that is sought out to explore over-suspiciousness taken to ridiculous extremes. In the animation we see amateur detective Squince’s (Squints) obsessive tendency in action as it has become more than a good practice and instead a bad habit.

In the process of making this animation we tried to find a way to exaggerate the suspense in a way that would convey that tension to the audience. In analyzing Squince’s action, her suspicion starts out understandably, but slowly progresses into an humorous habit that can be seen to dramatically affect her everyday life.

Visually, the animation borrows from the film noir genre, a time of historically escalated suspicion and distrust during the Cold War. We thought that reflecting this genre in the animation would be appropriate as the black and white shots of the films of that era, often taken from angles that make the viewer uneasy would naturally evoke a sense of mystery and  cautiousness.  We adapted the music in the animation to suit these needs as well, taking an otherwise normal song for a movie such as this and skipping it at the end, creating a sound commonly heard in horror.

Designing in Digital Summary

This article questions what makes good design in digital storytelling. Joe Lambert tries to answer this by looking a design issues and discussing them. LAmbert is the leader in series of workshops geared to instruct students on digital storytelling.  In talking about the subject matter, Lambert pretty quickly comes across the term cliche. As quoted by Lambert, cliche is a “great and nasty word” derived the old press terminology referring to a ready-made phrase that was commonly used and cast as a sentence for easier inclusion as opposed to using individual letters each time. Lambert continues on to say that cliche is something dependent on culture and context; a phrase or convention that make have seemed overdone to an professional artist may seem new to a particular audience. In this age of constant bombardment by--sometimes intrusive--media, it becomes harder to stand out as original. However, there are entire markets such as advertising that make this their primary goal.

In discussing a particularly successful display of digital storytelling, Lambert goes on to talk about the work of his peer Robert Kershaw who also completed the workshop prior to joining the group. The rest of the paper goes into deep description of Kershaw’s story “Camaro Boy”.  Lambert notes how the artist’s presentation maintained the audience’s attention despite the use of corely two images in the entire presentation. The entire piece could be related to a slideshow with the artist narrating the story. However, opposed to showing two still images for the whole two minutes, the artist presents the image in cropped section, adding for focus and eliminating stagnancy or redundancy. He also uses conventions such as zooming or panning to add interest. Lambert takes time to also note Kershaw’s use of pacing, along with the narration of the story. The visual focuses only on the photos that are most relevant to the story, limiting it down to those three, and squeezing in about ten more almost like a montage in the moment Kershaw talks about a moment of rapid changes in his life.