Short Story

Include some text explaining the assignment, your inspiration for the story and its relation to the animation.

For English we had to write a couple of short stories during this unit. We chose one to base our animation off of. The story I ended up choosing was Across the Sea, which was inspired by the Weezer song with the same name. My animation is also about a girl who writes a letter to someone who lives far away.

 

Across the Sea

            She was a quiet girl, a modest girl. Soft-spoken, she tried not to draw attention to herself. Immersed in music, the teenage girl would often spend hours in her room strumming her guitar, writing music. Her friends would jam, sometimes getting together to play shows for fundraisers. Since the first day she heard her mother sing, she knew music was going to be her life.
            As artists often are, the girl found herself devoting hours and hours of time to hone her skills, play for fun, experience new genres and works. One night, as she was drifting off to sleep, a song began to hum softly out of the radio’s speakers. A young man’s voice, soft yet clear, sang along with a piano. Her eyes drooped down, but her ears were wide-awake. These were new sounds she’d never heard before. As the song ended, she jotted down the title and artist. She wanted to Google it as soon as she could, but she fell asleep before she could kick the covers off.
            This man and his music became her new passion. She’d never admit to being obsessed – it wasn’t a crazed, maniacal love she had for him, but more an intense passion and admiration. His favorite color, his hobbies, his birthday – she knew them as well as if they were her own.
            She preferred pen and paper over key and screen, and had long amassed a huge collection of stationery. She would often handwrite letters to friends and loved ones; she even had pen pals in faraway countries. When she stumbled across the man’s fan mail address, the first thing that popped into her mind was a piece of off-white stationery, simple yet beautiful.             When she got home that night, she walked over to her cabinet, flipped through folders, and found the stationery set. Her hands picked up paper and pen, and she set to work.
            The letter was mailed two weeks after, not because she’d had so much to write, but because she couldn’t decide exactly what to write. She had so many things to tell him, so many things to show him! In the end, the letter was only one page long, the margins filled with doodles.
            The young man received the letter two weeks after it was postmarked. He lived across the world from her, in the Promised Land. He’d never seen so elegant and refined an envelope, stamp, piece of paper. As he read her letter and smiled at her drawings, his heart began to beat a tiny bit faster.
            That whole night, he wasn’t able to sleep. His mind kept on thinking about her, this girl who was in love with his music, with him! She didn’t come off as the creepy, stalker-type at all. No, he thought, this is a real girl. A real girl who lives across the sea.
            He wrote a song for her the next morning – or was it the same night? Often he’d found that the wee hours of the morning, when night flowed into light, were the best times to create art. This new song was released soon afterward, quickly sky-rocketing to the top of the charts.
            One day the girl heard this new song on the radio, just as she was waking up. She smiled, recognizing the drawings and words he was singing about. She yearned to meet him in person, hoped fervently the day would come, had tried all she could to make enough money to fly there – but the young man was killed that same fateful day, when his tour bus was hit by drunk, speeding driver’s truck. Across the sea, her hope died with him.