Brainstorming Concepts - One Word Film

Below are some of the concepts I had for the One Word Film project for DSDN101. I  by far prefer brainstorming all of an idea visually as opposed to jotting clouds of words - I find this the easiest way to retain my original visualisations.

Frightening

This was my idea for animating the word "frightening", I was really going for the initial shock effect similar to how you might find a scene in a horror film that would play a really loud and scary noise right as the bad guy's head would suddenly appear behind the tormented mistress. In this scene I wanted to have the 'ening' part of the word 'frightening' to be hiding in what I would presume is a house made of letters in a lightening storm, where they would pull back to curtain peeking outside, the lightning would thunder down and they'd pull back the curtain. Opening it once more the lightning would strike and a colossal 'fright' would be towering outside like a giant T-Rex ready to eat the poor little letters. Cue scary sound effects. The letters would try to run away, but in their shock they run straight into a wall, and reconcile with the other half of the word to make 'frightening'

I'm really quite keen on this idea, provided I can work out a suitable way to have the letters hiding away under a curtain of darkness. I imagine this might rely quite heavily on the sound for the shock effect, but hopefully I can make the flashing lights and the "Fright" part of the word look really scary too.

Reform

 A witty little animation I thought, making a visual anagram of the word 'reform' where all the letter swapped with each other by way of the letters popping in and popping out of their places to form, mostly making nonsensical variations of letters for the most part, but eventually forming the word 'reform'. I originally thought about starting with reform as the word that changes and eventually it makes it way back to it's original state, but then I found that one of the anagrams of 'reform' was 'former', and having that at the beginning would work really well.

I am unsure though whether the animation would be misconstrued to think that the one word in my film was 'former', which would go on to make no sense when 'reform' popped up. Alternatively I could start with 'reform' and cycle through anagrams until it came back to the start which would make it a good film to loop, but I'd also run the risk of losing the effect of the one word by having many others in the animation too.

Rebuild

In this animation I wanted the world 'build' to topple over like a house of cards, and from there the word would build itself up again into 'rebuild'. I thought the idea of having the letters 'r' and 'e' stack the other letters back up again, then they could climb the tower they made and sit on top, where the word would be complete again.

I struck problems when I started thinking about how the building actually fell over though - was it pushed? Did it explode? Did someone sneeze? And if I was to have 'r' and 'e' come and do the rebuilding, where would they come from? Were they there at the start? Do they just come in from off-stage?

Create

This is one of favourite ideas so far, it's a very simple idea made stronger through repetition of the same animation of letters popping on the screen until there is so many of them that the screen is black with letters, and then the same idea is repeated again in white to simply spell 'create'. I think it would have a strong visual impact and would be relatively easy to animate and add sound to, always an appealing option.

I am however worried that the animation, whilst simple in essence, might become so crowded that either the viewer will become overburdened with watching it, or the software will. I have to keep in mind that the animation is only 12 frames per second, and given the speed that I want to have the letters animate themselves that might just be a bit too slow. That or maybe it won't end up as a very fluid clip with a million letters on the stage.

Sketch

This is another one of my favourite ideas, for the unlimited potential for ideas once you consider the letter 't' as a pencil, and the essence of the word sketch; you can pretty much draw whatever you want. Well, as long as it fits the design brief. The idea here is basically that the letter 't' draws the rest of the word 'sketch' and then slots itself in the middle at the end of the scene.

I think the potential for this scene is more than just spelling out the word with a couple of pencil on paper sounds, I would like to find a way to draw the word sketch such that it isn't revealed that drawing the word was the intent at the start of the film, but that at the end of the scene the word 'sketch' is "unveiled" in a sense.

Intoxicate

Yet another favourite of mine, I think this word has a lot of potential for a playful and humourous animation. In this scene the word 'intoxicate' gets drunk by means of skulling back the letter 'i' as if it were a bottle of liquor, and the letters in the word begin behaving inebriated; stumbling, staggering and swaggering until their eventual demise in any number of ways a drunk person might end their night on. I like the versatility of this idea as there are many ways to visually display intoxication, giving rise to many different ways of animating this particular scene, for which it applies quite snugly to the brief in the sense of exploring "the way how things and people move as very powerful characteristics of every day objects and actions" as the concept also has the flexibility to allow for plenty of character  to be given to the words without detracting from the scene itself. 

I'm slightly concerned that there might not be enough flexibility to display a good example of intoxication if I was to animate the word as a whole, and inversely animating each letter individually would be taxing to have all the characters interacting in a coherent fashion and might result in an overly chaotic scene. This however would still remain true to the definition of intoxication, though the viewer may not enjoy the scene for it's despondency. The other concern is that this may not be an appropriate topic for a university project. Then again, it is university.

Gravitate

This was one of my more subdued concepts where the letters behave like planets in a solar system. It would be a slow animation of two letters slowly moving together by the force of gravity and the other letters of the word would orbit around the central characters slowly at first, and gradually faster as they begin to accelerate towards the center of their rotation. Eventually the letters would stop in their rotation to form the word "gravitate". 

I think this concept would be a visually effective animation, with plenty of opportunity to use some spacy sound effects, possibly some music like the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I originally thought it would be too simplistic an animation, though if done well I'm certain it would be quite entertaining if the sound effects were epic enough to support the motion. And as Leonardo Da Vinci once said, "simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication", and in this instance I certainly believe that this is a "less is more" type of animation.

Vessel

This was another concept I thought was worth looking in to, as the word 'vessel' is ambiguous and could facilitate exploration of both meanings of the word; 'vessel' as in a container used for drinking and 'vessel' as in a kind of automobile or flying craft. The shape of the letter in the word also make for easy manipulation - as in the example above the 'V' could be used as a cup for drinking out of, and the shape of the letters in the word could also easily be rearranged to look like a car or a plane.

Herein lies my contemplations about this particular scene - It is already very similar to the concept above for 'intoxicate' as one might assume that whatever being drunk out of the vessel is alcoholic, and if I was to animate the scene such that the V is drunk out of and the word transforms into a car or plane which zooms off it might also be misconstrued as advocating drunk driving.