This section shows the progression of the film’s plot line in all its forms up to the second full draft. The story planning process took about two months, with lots of research in between, in order to get my story where I wanted it to be.
Story
Beginnings
Hover over image and click the arrows to flick through my notes.
First Thoughts
This is the mind map where I first came up with the idea for the story. It’s funny looking back, but in these first scribbles I had written that the characters “make the most of the time” they have together. This is a sentiment that I always wanted to have in my piece, however, it took me a long time to realise its importance.
Wording
Here I was trying to find the words to express what I wanted to achieve with this project. I’m not good with words, there’s a reason there’s only one sentence in my whole film. So this took a lot more time and work than you’d expect. It was important for me to get this right because, while my goals and the purpose of this project was very clear in my mind, I needed to be able to explain my project to others.
Moments
In the beginning I didn’t have a fully planned cohesive story. I had a collection of ideas for moments of the film, but no story linking these moments together. You can see the beginnings of ideas here, that did carry through right to the end. For example, representing the shock in stylised darkness with sound distortion.
First Draft
This was my first go at writing a cohesive story. This version of the story was very reflective of what was happening in my life at the time. It is, in essence, the middle of what would be the final film, with the start and ending removed. I believe I wrote it like this because, at the time, the middle was all I could see. There was no ending, after Knit unravels, because my dad had just died. That was the only ending I could see.
A lot changed from this draft to the final piece, from the addition of
a beginning and an ending, to complete character changes. One thing
I had not done before writing this draft was research, and it shows. Between this draft and the second draft is when I did all of
my research.
There are, however, elements of this draft that are not too far from the final cut. For example, you can see that I originally planned to combine sections of coloured animation with sections of black and white. I also stuck with the palette of colours I used for this draft for my final animation. The colours I used were all eye dropped from swatches
of crayola pencils to give the colour scheme a sense of familiar childhood fun.
Hover over image and click the arrows to flick through my notes.
Failed Drafts
Failed Draft 1
This is the beginning of a storyboard that I started to create far too early. This storyboard made me realise two main things. The first was that I had not yet done enough research, especially in terms of storytelling. The second was that I could not draw to scale or with the correct perspective without a reference. This prompted me to create poseable models of my characters and photograph them on a homemade set.
Failed Draft 2
This was my first real attempt at writing the second draft. At this point I had done all my research and I was ready to write it. The problem was my method. I just started to write a linear story from start to finish, but I quickly realised that’s not how my brain works. My mind would skip over details and then come back to them. Because of this, I scrapped this version and actually wrote my second draft as a series of mind maps. This gave me the freedom I needed to write the story in whatever order I wanted.
Hover over image and click the arrows to flick through my notes.
Thoughts
Hover over image and click the arrows to flick through my notes.
Gathering Thoughts 1
Often after doing research I would stop and mind map to gather my thoughts. This first one was created after doing all of the storytelling research. You can see me trying to take what I have learned and apply it to my own project.
Gathering Thoughts 2
This was inspired by one of Pixar’s rules. Each Pixar story opens with “once upon a time...” and “every day…” This made me realise that I had not yet done close to enough world building. I did not know what my characters did every day. So I created this mind map to come up with ideas for things the characters would usually do together.
Gathering Thoughts 3
This is one of the last mind maps I did before the second draft. At this point I had done all my research, I just needed to gather my thoughts so that I could figure out what my story looked like now.
Second Draft
After doing all my research, collecting my thoughts and trying to write the story in a linear fashion, I decided to mind map my second draft. I created five mind maps: one for the beginning, three for the middle and one for the end of the story. This allowed me to jump around the story and fill in details out of order. This suited my style of writing much better.
This is the first draft of the story that has a strong resemblance to the final outcome. These mind maps are what I referenced when creating my final storyboard and writing my final draft of the story.
Hover over image and click the arrows to flick through my notes.