Fiction Adaptation: Research 1

After reading 'The Death Bed' by Siegfried Sassoon I had an idea of creating a paranormal look to the video, as the poem was about death. And one way of creating an eery atmosphere was stop motion or animation. I wasn't sure which technique I was going to use to create my short film, so I decided to research into both techniques to see which one I would prefer to do.

Animation is a simulation of movement created by a showing a series of pictures/frames, i.e. cartoons. Some examples of cartoons are Adventure Time, The Powerpuff Girls, Ben 10 etc.

The Tale of the Three Brothers, from the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This animation tells a simple story about three brothers who cheat death, however death finds a way to catch after them. Death in this film is seen as a character, like the grim reaper.

I liked how silhouettes was used to show the characters. If there was a lot of detail to the characters this may have been distraction to the story. I noticed that there were only two main colours used, cream, as the sky/background and black for the characters silhouettes and buildings. The colours used worked very well with the story, the colours weren't harsh against each other, unlike if they used white and black together.

This animation was quite short and only lasted 3 minutes. I found it easy to watch and I didn't get bored at all. No dialogue was used, except for the narration, which helped me concentrate on hearing the story and watching the animation show this. There were very few sound effects used, i.e. walking on gravel, the slitting of the throat, etc. It really helped bring certain parts of the story to life.

The music was quite low throughout the film, as the narration was talking on top.

Prologue animation, from the film Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I couldn't think of other animations that were similar to the Harry Potter one, so I decided to speak to Sei-Kai and she said there was an animated part at the beginning of Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

This animation was much longer than the Harry potter one and lasted nearly 7 minutes. I don't know if it was because it was longer, or if it didn't catch my attention as much, but I ended up getting bored halfway through it.

It was different how this animation was much slower and showed stills of each scene. The beginning of this film it shows Hellboy when he was younger and his father reading a story to him. When you see Hellboy and his father the music reminds me of a music box, however once Hellboy's father starts reading the story about the great war, the music becomes much louder. When the story returns the Hellboy and his father the music returns to the music box music.

The father is the narrator of the story and imitates the difference characters he talks about from the books, like how a parent would when reading a story to their child.

The scenes shown were very colourful, but I noticed that the colour red was used more, especially in the war scenes. Maybe this was to represent violence and bloodlust in wars.

Overall both of these animations have inspired me, especially the Harry Potter animation, as it had a darkness to the story which I want to re-create in my fiction adaptation. Even though animation is something that I have always been interested in I think I will start to research into stop motion as it may be an easier to use, especially for beginners like me.