Praying for Mantis Love by Rachel Healy

I now have a final story that I am happy with and shall post it shortly. I have been sketching some character designs and am half way through storyboard. I have also come up with a style for my film which will be silhouetted black characters with coloured eyes like shadow puppets and colourful backgrounds (will also look at secret of nimh for backgrounds), influences for this are michel ocelet and lotte reiniger.

I had to go through quite a lot of ideas and processes to come up with the end result:

I used the book Animation Writing and Development From Script Development to Pitch to help me with my initial ideas for films. I did exercises like the combining elements to create a stories;

“Cartoonists used to make three columns:

• People or animals

• Places

• Things

Then they would often pick one item at random from each column, juxtaposing and combining totally different ideas”. Wright (2005, p.42).

However, this alone does not mean you have an instant story and script, the most important thing is the character arcs, the plot points and the overall moral message that is revealed at the end. So i read other books and most of them suggest there are only a certain amount of actual stories to tell and that the way they are been dressed up and portrayed is what makes them different. So i tried to think of the most common themes and the ones people can instantly relate to and also the ones that strike emotion into the audience the most and quickest as i only have 3 minutes.

“Some believe that all plots can be broken down to only three: Man vs God (or nature), Man vs Man, and Man vs Himself”. Wright (2005, p.43).

This is a very broad outline for a story so i looked into the love stories like love triangles, or the love between mother and daughter or forbidden love etc. The most famous love story is Romeo and Juliet. This is one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Two lovers who are not allowed to be in love because of a feud. So i wanted to do something along these lines but not copying as i still want originality.