Hypercinema - Week 3 (24-09-24)

Short Short Story Telling

When we were assigned this project of creating a 3 - 10 second looping stop motion, all I could think about was the 6-word story challenge. With a very strict limitation, we needed to create a narrative as precise and evocative as possible. So Sana and I started with looking for stories or fables that we could draw inspiration from and started with the idea of "rebirth" as the word suggests repetition and allows us to leverage the looping quality as a feature of storytelling. 

We started ideating with origami, since the act of folding a figure lends to the idea of creating life and "killing" an origami figure is relatively accessible. However, the story sequence of creating an origami figure and then unfolding it is a common, almost cliche, subject for stop motion, so we pivoted directions and introduced the idea of shadow puppets into the storyline. 

We entertained the idea of starting with zoomed in view of a snail shaped shadow, panning out to seeing the hand. Then suddenly the light turns on and the shadow disappears, but in place of it is an origami snail. The camera then zooms into the origami snail until the scale matches the shadow snail, and the scene blacks out to which the stop motion loops as the flashlight turns on again and the shadow snail appears again.

​The biggest challenge with this story was the physicality of light, shadow, and scale. Its hard to get a sharp shadow in view without seeing the hand, unless you move the hand away from the wall. This creates an issue of working with a large shadow and needing a large origami snail, which we did not have a the time of filming. So we decided to pivot again with a different storyline.

The final piece tells the story of conquering  your fears and realizing that sometimes scary things are not as frightening as they seem. Also it is okay to back away from situations that you are not comfortable in.