The
child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his
play or games.
Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a
creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own,
or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new
way which pleases him?
Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
The Story Teller’s Apprentice
- Project Proposal
fairy tale generator
Proposal: To explore the possibilities for either a stand
alone or web browser based application that will encourage
students to think about the process of producing an
original script for a stop frame animation based on
traditional fairy tale structures supplemented by elements
of random narrative creation, providing a teaching resource
that will be engaging and fun.
The proposal arises out of a combination of my classroom
teaching with year 7 and 8 students and my own explorations
into the realms of narrative structure and interactive
media. My target audience would therefore obviously be
these 13 year olds.
The teaching that I have been doing in recent years is
strongly influenced by early experimentation in animation,
from the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Lotte Reiniger and
Norman Mclaren, and devices such as the zoetrope,
praxinoscope, and flip books. I have been exploring stop
frame animation with my year 8 students, working with
techniques such as cut paper, silhouette and simple
reciprocating animation. This fits well with my reading of
Vladimir Propp’s ‘Morphology of the Folk Tale’ Christopher
Vogler’s ‘The Writer's Journey’ and by association, Joseph
Campbell’s ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’. These are the
main sources of inspiration for this proposal.
I have also been exploring the relationship between still
and moving image; small interactive animations, inspired by
the effect of ‘scrubbing’ through sequences of still images
on an ipod, panoramic quicktime movies, and reciprocating
animations created in Adobe Flash. I am fascinated by the
plethora of flash ‘experiments’ online, little pieces that
explore elements of movement and interactivity. There is a
strong resonance in these pieces with elements of play; the
need to turn a handle, pull a leaver; the equivalent to
penny arcade machines, the pop up book, the ‘idle’
creativity of the doodle or fridge magnet poetry. There is
an elemental excitement and power in the hyperlink; the
button that makes something happen, takes you from one
place to another. And there is potential in this, in
relation to illustration, even if this interactivity is
very basic; the ability to mouse over an image to animate
it, explore a panoramic scene, rotate a virtual three
dimensional object. I believe that there is a direct
lineage between this type of experimental interactivity,
and the sort of experimentation that cinematographers and
animators were creating in the very early days of the
moving image, and before, with magic lantern shows,
phantasmagoria; the many wonderful devices of lens, mirror,
and polished wood. Perhaps, as Dziga Vertov explored the
language of film through his montage ‘Man with a Movie
Camera’, the programmers creating interactive flash/web
content are, wittingly or otherwise, extending this
language to encompass new media. This connects with the
concepts of spatial montage in Lev Manovich’s ‘The Language
of New Media’.
The fairy tale generator would have advice on how to
structure a story, with examples from classic fairy tales.
There could be an ‘ask teacher’ avatar, generating random
but fun answers to questions, or a ‘plot summary’ feature,
to give potted summaries of classic stories, or perhaps
more detailed information about story structure. The
application might also include the ability to generate
thumbnail illustrations to story board the script that is
being generated.
The main concept of this proposal would simply be to create
an entertaining interface through which my students would
generate scripts for their animations. I have been
experimenting with web based form generation in Adobe
Acrobat and Acrobat.com, the ‘fairy tale generator’ would
be an extension of this idea. My students (particularly the
boys) tend to rush this part of the project, eager to get
on with the actual process of animating with laptops,
lights and cameras. By putting the script writing element
of the project on the computer my intention would be to
extend and develop this part of the project, to amuse and
engage the students, and to make them think a little more
clearly about the plot of the stories that they were
creating.
If it were technically feasible I would like the students
to be able to create and upload thumbnail sketches to
illustrate their stories. I would also like to create a
system of login accounts so that I could track the work of
individuals or small groups.
In the background the application would store the sections
of script that students are generating, giving me the
possibility of using the same programme to generate truly
random tales, based on chunks of text entered by students,
along the lines of the Surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’
or ‘consequences’. I am very interested in this concept of
interchangeable, modular work, be it text or image,
elements like houses in a street, railway trucks hooked
together into a train, along the lines of the ‘myriorama’
(sets of cards that create an endless landscape, combinable
in any combination; a popular 18 century curiosity). In my
teaching I often try to create projects were the work of
individuals or small groups can be combined at the end of
the project into a larger work, or to get groups of
students working on different aspects of a project. There
is also a pleasing surrealist element to the concept of
random story generation, and the possibility of amusing
random results.
A final interest in relation to this proposal is the use of
the silhouette as a device. Silhouette illustration is
synonymous with fairy tale and myth. There are the artistic
and historic links; to the figures on Greek vases, Egyptian
art, oriental shadow theatre, and the European tradition of
paper cut silhouette. But also the implication of the
shadow in relation to the Jungian archetype, the collective
unconscious, the universality of story; deeply embedded in
the psyche. It interests me that Hans Christian Anderson
was also a devotee of the cut paper silhouette.
The technical challenge with this proposal will be an
application that is based on a combination of flash, web
and database technology, with interaction, ‘drag and drop’
simplicity, and an enticing interface. The work completed
to date is mostly experimental, along with the project work
that I have done in school, but I am very keen to get a
working prototype up and running in the new year, to test
with my next group of year 8 students.
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