Concept

Paul Dreissen – animation and

storyboard artist
“Often it is the most difficult aspects of doing
any piece of creative work is finding an
idea that has any genuine potential for an
original film, and the worst thing that
anyone can do is place a blank piece of
paper in front of someone and say “write”
or “draw”.”
Techniques for generating initial
ideas
 Using personal experiences and
memory
• intrinsically related to drawing on
background
• Requires to go through a structural
approach where you remain objective
throughout
• Treat experiences and events as
possibilities for a narrative and other form
of expression
• Examples?
 Sense memories
• Everyone has an “emotional memory” that is
build on out 5 senses (seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling and tasting)
• remembering when we saw something beautiful
or tragic, heard a piece of music, smelt an
odour. Touched something or someone, tasted
something delicious
• All may be a catalyst to a story idea
• Using the senses is fundamental to any creative
process
 The formative years
• Many artists, not only involved in
animation, are influenced by their creative
work in their youth
• Long term likes and dislikes are often the
first things that inspired the formation of a
story line. Many develop a “voice” of their
own after this initial stage
• Can be a conscious or un conscious
process
 Using iconic images
• contemporary culture is a visual one, We are
surround by visual stimulus in images, sign and
pictorial information (as well as our physical
environment)
• Sometimes signs or images take on “iconic “
value and pass into popular culture (really just
becoming know to a mass population)
• Can be used as a foundation for future
interpretation or development (often see “iconic”
characters being combined in animation that
ignores the era that the originated from).
 Scenario
• A house sitting on a railway track
• Imagine everything to do with a railway –
even make a list, even move to a different
era, basically anything that comes to mind
• Stories and gags start to emerge from that
scenario
 Evolving a storyline
• Tend to contain three essential elements:
• Set-up or scenario
• Conflict
• Resolution
 Set-up
• Introduce your audience to the setting,
characters and circumstances of your story
• Your audience needs to be introduced to the
world in which about to take them into
• All the parameters of your storyline are set at
this stage
• Think about the open scenes of Toy Story
• Andy’s bedroom, toys come to life, birthday
presents for Andy, new toy arrives........pretty
much that’s all for the rest of the film
 Crawl as a method of set-up
• Set-up (or sometimes referred to as Exposition) -
defined as the facts needed to begin the story
• Facts include – main characters, time period,
plot situation and location
• If the audience is never given these facts they
can never become involved in the story – mainly
because they are distracted trying to fill in the
missing exposition
• The fundamentals of exposition were first
described and used by Aristotle in ancient Greek
theatre
• Many movies use the “crawl” as a
technique to “set-up” the story to the
audience
• Star Wars being a obvious example, but is
not a new technique, think of the opening
scenes in Casablanca
• The crawl can also be a narrative over the
opening sequence – such as The
Shawshaw Redemption
 Conflict
• Point where things start to
go wrong for the characters
• Characters may behave out
of keeping with what we
believed them to be, our
hero character (Woody)
may suddenly be
threatened by unexpected,
or out of control events
around him/her (the arrival
of Buzz Lightyear)
 Resolution
• Usually the end of the movie (but not always) –
the conflict comes to a climax and is resolved
one way or another
• Happy/sad ending or just one that leaves the
audience wondering
• It does not need to resolve the storyline from the
first 2 stages but it does need to leave the
audience feeling satisfied
• This is obviously not required in a series, where
you deliberately leave the audience hanging and
wanting more
 Concept
• Fantasy versus reality – everyone can fantasise and
imagine the world on their own terms and conditions.
• Often these are in stark contrast to the world in which
they live, therefore this juxtaposition can be very
fruitful for the artist, as acute observation of the
patterns of the real world set against free imagination;
unconcerned with rules, regulations and convention,
can produce interesting points of comparison
Using oppositions and comparisons
• The obvious point of comparison and opposition
between people, other creatures, the environment
etc. can produce a “dramatic conflict” that can
generate ideas
• Creating a particular tension or problem that must
be resolved in some way is a fundamental aspect
to many narratives
• Often this emerges from the dramatic conflict of
opposition or difference
 example
• Think of conflicts or opposites in nature –
hills/valleys, sea/land, underwater/air,
fire/water, peace/love....
• Take – land, sea and air – once you
establish things that happen in these
environments – rain, storm, up, down,
hunger, love
• Stories should follow......
 Using and revising traditional story
premises
• Most cultures are brought up on hearing stories (not only
as children), reading stories and creating stories about
our own lives and experiences
• We are highly attuned to the capacity for narrative,
everyday we express our inner life, things that happen
and others as “stories”, all built on an instinctive structure
of a beginning, middle and end
• We do retain many popular narratives and their structure
from our culture
• They can be very effective stimuli for developing the
stories further
 Example
• “Oh what a knight” –has a comic feel to
the title. It is a typical damsel in distress –
hero comes to the rescue
• We all know the outcome, the knight will
overcome adversity and rescue the
damsel
• But then what? How will the end be funny?
• Tomek Baginski