In this week, we have to finalize our idea for our assignment – 30 seconds animated short film, it was quite challenging as we have so many ideas that we hope that we can apply it in our animation film, however, there is limited time. We try to write out the story first and see how it goes.
We want to write a simple story about a baby bird and mommy bird and content evolving misadventure and triumph through personal growth.
The baby bird want to try its very own first fly, as all of its siblings had flew away from the nest. The mother bird encourages the baby bird to step out its comfort zone (the nest) and learn to fly as flying is their basic viability. Then the baby bird finally nerve itself and spread its wings to fly, while flying with the mother bird, the baby bird gets distracted and veers off its own direction from mum’s path. When the baby bird gets lost, a thunderstorm sudden came in and the baby bird gets stuck. The baby bird need to find its way out and withstand the bad whether and pass through it. A ray of light breaks from the clouds, that also represent a glimmer of hope (associating with its mum); the baby bird fly into the light and found its mother. From the whole journey, the baby bird learn independence as its went against through challenges (clouds / thunderstorm) and learn not to give up while meeting challenges.
We also try to draw some example of our character design. Here is my original idea of how the baby bird might look. Our design basically round or square shape create through round or square shape. I try to create the baby bird in square shape as I think that square-shape could make the character’s movement look a bit clumsy that might accord to a newborn baby bird, but edges might make the character looks strong which is the opposite characteristic of the small and exquisite baby bird, so I rounded all the edges.
Not sure why the outcome result show as a chicken rather than a bird ……. We finally sort out it might because of the feather on the baby bird’s head. I also draw some others baby bird that show as in the picture below, the result comes out more likely to bird.
Next, we have to finalize our story structure for our animated short film. We first done a rough storyboard and narrative structure for it, and also draw out some possible scene in order to see how we present the scene in different angles. We hope to present our story in a simple way so that audience able to catch up and understand the story; not only that, we have to be aware of some tiny small details in the environment (scene) to ensure that the story looks smooth and reasonable.
I done some storyboard in a more details way (camera angles, scene’s environment, character’s expression/ movement) of how the story looks like after we finalize the narrative structure.
There are some rough example of the baby bird’s movement.
Aveline Yong 
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