Praying for Mantis Love by Rachel Healy

i have added more flash to my animatic, i obviously need to finish it off. but i am also going to change the beginning mating scene a bit to make it more scary and ritualistic, perhaps lighting, sound effects and different camera angles will help. i am also changing the chapel scene, the mother gives her the symbolic pendant when she is explaining the tradition. also i need to elongate the shot showing the carvings of the tradition in the chapel. this is so the whole tradition aspect of the story is clearer.

i have also been researching audience psychology and the way in which society relates to film. hopefully my film will appeal to a fairly broad audience as it conforms to the narrational codes and conventions expected from society.

“Althusser and Barthes, theorists essentially determined the audience as a subject, and not as a set of undifferentiated individuals and, thus, engaged with the idea of cinema as an ideological apparatus, and one which created certain structures of address which demanded that an audience recognise and participate in certain narrational codes and conventions, informed by a number of possible discourses (i.e. political, representational, psychoanalytical etc.)”. Wells (1998, p.222).

Before film and especially animated film, society was less used to the whole media culture and less open minded, media and film is a gateway to everything in the world these days. Therefore, i think my film would have been less accepted back then visually but the story is one that has always been. Today my film is not shocking  and could be considering fairly orthodox... but i hope it still remains original. The story of love, tradition and tragedy would be understood no matter what culture or time.

“socialised identification out of Western practices, and determines dominant and preferred agendas concerning representation and modes of permission, power and order. Implicitly, it has been suggested that animation, as a form, subverts many of the orthodoxies of mainstream live-action cinema and, indeed, even operates in a more radical way than various kinds of counter-cinema have sought to do”. Wells (1998, p.222).

I think this is very true of animation, it can get away with a lot more than live-action does, if my film were to be re-made as a live-action it would be more of a horror genre and not for children. It is would probably a bit more out there and weird, but within the world of animation it is fairly sane. I think it is unconsciously influenced by Western culture, as I live in it, however, the shadow puppet aspect holds its origins in eastern culture and this influenced Lotte Reiniger, who in turn influenced me.

The camera angles and shots etc are also easier to construct than in live-action and but are essentially the same. I used this book, The art of the storyboard : storyboarding for film, TV and animation,  to help me decide on the shots depending on the action. shots looking up at the character (high hat angle) in threatening or scary situations, looking down at the character for sympathy, close-ups for intense emotion and character reaction at important points in the film etc. However, i don’t want to stray too far from the style of shadow puppetry and lotte reiniger so i am tried to focus more on what is happening rather than trying to make an interesting or extreme shot. Also the whole silhouette thing makes some shots confusing if they are at an odd angle.