Animation Project Ideas

Idea #1:
Concept:
I had a small virus about a week ago and had to drink Nyquil by the gallon in order to get to sleep at night. Not only did the medicine help me regain the ability to breathe through my nose, it also gave me some very vivid and f’ed up dreams, which is always fun. This gave me some inspiration for a possible animation project as well. The story would be set around the idea of living in dreams versus living in reality. Can we get too caught up in our dreams to notice what is actually going on around us? If this is an autobiographical animation, then the answer is yes.

The basic story that I have right now is about a girl who believes that her life is boring. She spends most of her time sleeping because she enjoys her exciting dreams. She sleeps so much that she begins to have trouble getting to sleep at all. She starts to take sleeping pills to get back to sleep and her dreams. The entire time this is going on she is ignoring what is going on in reality. Right now, the only way I can see it ending is that she over doses on the sleeping pills. It seems sad to me, but that’s probably because the character is based off me minus the drugs. “Hugs not Drugs” has always been my motto… That’s a lie. I don’t like to be touched.

Moving on to possible techniques:
I’ve always thought that stop animation seemed very dream-like. I think that it could really enhance the story. I was thinking that two different formats of stop animation could be used for this, one for the reality sequences and another for the dreams.

I kind of want the animations for the reality sequence to take place in reality, a lot like Pan With Us. I am still in love with the glass pane animation part of that animation. I don’t know if glass would be the best thing to use for this. I think it’s something that I’ll have to experiment with for awhile. I just know that I want images of the real world going on around the characters real world.

For the dream sequences I think that claymation or puppet animation (Like Aria) might be the best technique to use. It always makes me think of dreams.

Idea #2
Concept:
This idea I blogged about over Christmas break and it’s still stuck in my head. It’s the whole idea about putting pressure on yourself to fit in with everyone else. I want it to play with the idea that we’re all not supposed to do the same things and live the same kind of life. As opposed to my previous idea, I want this one to be a little more comical.

Basically my character lives in a box (a metaphorical one- but the house is also box shaped and she works in a cubical). The characters actions each day are always the same as the previous day’s and also the same as the people around her. The street that she lives on has similar looking houses. Everyone wears the same clothes and drives the same car. Very boring stuff to say the least. One day something happens to the girl (I haven’t decided what yet) and she starts to act different from everyone else. By the end she discovers the importance of being different than everyone else.

Technique:
For this story I imagine it going to the same sort of direction as a Don Hertzfeldt animation. The boring world the character lives in should be very minimal without a lot of color. The easiest way to do this, I believe, would be with cel animation with just black ink on white paper. But I think that the texture in the paper might add some dimension to the world that I don’t really want in the beginning of the story. As the story progresses, I would like to incorporate more and more color and detail to the world. Perhaps the best technique to use would be flash or after effects to ensure that the world stays flat.

Idea #3
Concept and Technique:
I pulled this idea from one of my self portrait ideas. It’s the one about nonexistent relationships. When I first came up with the idea, I thought that it would be best to do a series of still images with me narrating over them. Well when I was thinking up new idea for this project it dawned on me that that is basically stop motion but instead of still images that create a real jumpy effect, I would just have to take more photos to fill in the movements from one thing to another.

The idea came to me for my self portrait because at the time I was thinking about someone I had just met. I often create these whole scenarios of how my relationships with people will go. They never of course work out this way, but my imagination always beats reality. I originally thought of just focusing on romantic relationships and how those NEVER turn out the way I imagined. I think that it would create a nice link from one to the other. It would be really easy, and probably therapeutic, to go from my first crush to my most recent nonexistent affair.
Each story would follow the same path: initial encounter into the imaginary stuff then rewind and go through what actually happened.

For this one, I’d want to use real people in real places. I just need to find people who are not ADD and can stand still for a while.