In my animation, I attempted to create a more emotional and touching short film. In order to accomplish this, I tried to come up with a tragic story that ended in a relatively satisfying conclusion. Before writing my story, I was inspired by music video by Porter Robinson, "Shelter". In this music video, a story is animated about a girl who lives within her own virtual world of which she has complete control over. As she lives her life alone, one day she suddenly experiences memories from her childhood, revealing to the audience why she exists within the virtual reality. Even though I had to watch the short film a few times in order to fully comprehend the story, I found the animation extremely powerful, being able to tell an entire story within a short window of time, conveying several emotions through every second.
In order to make my animation convey the specific emotions I desired it to, I tried make the characters more appealing to the audience so that if anything happened to them, the emotions that the characters experienced would be inflicted upon the audience’s empathy.
A Daughter's Donation
As Noah walks along a bustling street with his daughter, wearing a crisp, collared shirt and a pair of nice dress pants, he encounters a person struggling to survive who requires assistance from others, just laying on the floor with a cup near his head. His face was covered in grime and mud and facial hair. His bushy beard fell down to the ground, turning gray and his fair was spread everywhere. The cup had only a few dollars in it, and the man continued to beg for more donations from nice hearts. Noah walks past him without a glance, but his daughter lingers around, questioning why Noah couldn’t donate even a little.
After the two get home, the father starts his stove to begin preparing a meal for his daughter. When he finished emptying a bag of noodles within boiled water, Noah goes upstairs and checks on his daughter to find her giving herself an eye exam by reading out letters from a poster on a wall. She is standing quite close to the poster and can barely read the letters. Noah smiles and turns towards another room to go fetch his daughter’s glasses. Just as he grabs them, the house begins to smell of smoke. The stove he had left on had caught a newspaper, one that he had left on there lazily, on fire. As his house was engulfed in flames, Noah rushes to his daughter and finds her still playing. He then frantically gestures for her to come to him where he could safely get her out. She slowly trudges towards him, making out his undefined form and feeling her surroundings as she goes.
As she made her way towards his outstretched arms, smoke billowed through the floorboards and the floor began to break away. Just as her daughter is about to reach Noah, the floor underneath her gives way and she falls through, past Noah’s flailing arms. The father frantically runs downstairs to look for her but the floor has already gone through horrible damage, having holes everywhere. Noah continues to desperately move furniture and obstacles around, trying to find his daughter, still clutching her glasses.
Noah walks down another bustling street along a yellow path set within a sidewalk and hears a small girl crying. The yellow path is covered in tiles each with small bulges. The girl waves her hand across her face and begins to cry even harder. Noah diverges from the path and walks toward her, bends down, and hands her the glasses that belonged to his daughter. He then returns to the path and walks to a crosswalk where the yellow path ends and from his pocket, takes out a white cane (used by blind people) and continues across the next block.