F5: Proposal | Paul's Blog

For my minor project, I want to produce a narrative short.Although I plan this to be a standalone short, I can see potential ways of developing this from a 1 minute film to a much longer one.

The story is following the journey of a boy in a tribe being prepped to become the next tribe leader, as a final task he is sent alone to kill a mythical animal in order to prove his strength to his tribe. The main character is divided on whether this will prove his strength or make him weaker as he will kill something that posed no threat to him or his tribe, because of this he misses plenty of chances of accomplishing his given task. The short film will end with the main character killing the mythical animal and therefore transforming into a mythical animal himself, revealing that he made the wrong decision and he would be hunted next. This is a metaphor for us dealing with certain tasks or problems in the wrong way and having to live by those decisions even though we had no other choice than to come to the same wrong verdict based on the information we were given.

The story is set in a world with no technology and where people have to be self-sufficient inorder to survive, this will add to the idea of being part of a tribe and it will make it easier for the audience to understand. The hunt will take place in a dense forest to further the idea of tribes ruling the land instead of large cities. I am planning to keep the colour palette very minimalistic with only the characters within the story receiving splashes of colour, this is to highlight my metaphor as a similar dilemma might happen again irrespective of the environment or location. Another reason I decided to stick with a limited colour palette is to make the animation aesthetically pleasing to the viewers, with indie games such as Children of the Light, Journey, Limbo and Hollow Knight being huge visual inspirations for me, I decide to try to combine the styles used in those games, to create my own style where I tried to stay away from outlines in combination with the limited use of colour this has create a style that I believe is more immersive for the audience.

Another stylistic choice I took is to only for the main character to have no features and just be a silhouette with eyes, I think this makes the main character much more relatable as he doesn’t look like anyone, which makes the audience focus on the story rather than his appearance.

Inspirations: