Introduction
The visual narrative unit has probably been my favorite unit in Freestyle so far. In this unit, we were given the freedom to write and create whatever we wished to. I learned how to work with shorter forms of writing stories, like flash fiction or animation, which I both greatly enjoyed, and greatly value the lessons learned.
Story
The assignment in English was to write a short story from 500 to 1000 words. I love writing – am writing stories constantly, actually – so it was challenging to try and limit myself to the 1000 words. For this project, I decided to use the character I had created for the Puppet Animation project I had in my elective class, as I wanted to expand more on her character. At first, I tried to go for a slightly more complicated story, that would be told like a legend or folktale, but as I began writing I realized that the story would be too complicated for too short a word count, so I changed gears and made the story more simple. I do like how it turned out.
鐘の音
(Sound of Bell)
The temple was Oinari-sama’s domain.
Guarded by large torii gates, the trip up the stone path to the temple was one taken often by the villagers under her protection. With them, they brought offerings, coins, and wishes.
They would line up, one by one, under her watchful gaze, at the center of the courtyard, where a single rope hung above a wooden box.
Toss a coin into the box.
Bow.
Bow.
Clap.
Clap.
Make a wish, she would beckon, silently, twirling her fingers through the ribbons of her braids – fox ears perked, ready to hear the thoughts—the prayers—of those whom she was duty-bound to protect.
Good harvest.
That my infant lives to see the next year.
For protection.
After wishing, the villagers would look at the rope in front of them, longingly, wanting to finish the ritual. At this, she would narrow her eyes, the villagers feeling the chills down their spines – before they would quickly bow in reverence and move away from the box, so the next person could make their wish.
She would not allow them to ring the bell.
After all of the villagers had given their wishes, they left, leaving her sitting alone on the top of the torii gate watching their fading backs. As she leapt from the top, turning back towards the temple so that she may rest for the evening, she heard a cry.
Snapping her head to the left, the goddess (or so she claimed) made her way towards the sound – and there, hidden between the kujibiki and omamori stands was a child, curled into a little ball. Underneath their mop of black hair there were tears streaming down their face, and they let out harsh screams that caused her ears to twitch above her head.
Children could see her, sometimes, if she chose to allow it – so she crouched down, extending her hand, hoping that the child would notice her presence – yet the child was unresponsive. She breathed in, preparing to speak (forgetting that she was unable to) – and at this, the child raised its head ever so slightly – allowing her to see the child’s eyes – the child’s eyes that were white in the middle, that had no pupil.
“I-is someone there?” the child asked. They raised their hand forward, trying to reach for whoever it was that they couldn’t see.
They’re blind. She thought, before crouching down and taking the child’s hand in her own. She cursed herself for her muteness.
“Are… are you one of the villagers?” the child asked – and at this, she traced the word no onto their hand.
“Are… are you Oinari-sama?” they blinked owlishly – she traced a small maybe.
The child didn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. “Why are the villagers gone? My okka-chan always told me that when we go to make wishes, we all go home after the last bells have been rung – but the bells haven’t rung yet – and the wishing bell didn’t ring a single time, so…”
She looked at the child, seeing the flickers of fear and worry in their eyes. If she rang the bells for the child, would the child go home? Or did they need the rest of the villagers with them to guide their way? Would the villagers return to the temple if she rang the bells?
The ringing of the bells was part of the rituals, sure, but they weren’t necessary, were they? She had done them all a favor, after all, making it so that they would not have to hear the deafening, ear-grating sounds of all those bells – the sound that was similar to the ones that used to jingle on her ear and necklace, the ones that used to sit at the edge of her Oinari-sama’s kimono, the ones that used to –
“Oinari-sama?” the child asked – as the one in front of them had not reacted in any way for the past few moments. “Um… could… Could you take me home? My okka-chan will start to worry for me soon.”
She would take them home, if she could – but it was starting to become night. On her own, she would have no hesitance, yet bringing a child with her down the mountain path would be a different story – she would not want to risk an ayakashi attack when there was a child with her. If it had been all the villagers together, she would have no worries, but she was unsure of what she could do on her own.
What to do now? The child could stay at the temple during the night, but as they had said, their mother would worry – and she could not have that.
The child solved that issue for her. “Oinari-sama?” they called. “If… if you can’t take me home, could you maybe ring the bell, to call the villagers? That way they’ll come back to get me.”
So she had to, then. The child startled as she raised them into her arms, before walking over to the box and the bell at the center of the temple courtyard.
You ring it, she mouthed into the child’s head when they stopped in front of it. The child, blessedly, understood – and brought their hands forward, grasping onto the rope – giving it a swift tug that caused the bell to ring loudly.
She had prepared herself to flinch at the sound of the bell – but it was a soft sound, a good sound – and she found, for some reason, that she didn’t mind as the bell continued to echo throughout the temple, down the stone pathway and into the ears of the villagers, who were now rushing back up the mountain.
Oh.
“It sounds so pretty!!” the child in her arms said, turning towards her with a smile on their face.
Yes, she mouthed onto their forehead. I suppose it is.
Illustrations
For the illustration project, we were required to use Adobe Illustrator in order to create a design or image that we would later turn into a physical object. For this project, I wanted to continue the theme of mystical creature – the main character in my short story, Nai, is a Japan-inspired mythical fox. I wanted to continue the theme, so I decided to make a new character. I was torn between a dragon-inspired character or a phoenix-inspired character, but eventually I chose to go with a phoenix, as I wanted to draw a winged character.
At first I considered making stickers, but I decided that I would rather have something I could put on my desk, or shelf, as a decoration, so I chose to go with an acrylic stand instead. The concept I was trying to go for was “breaking out of the picture” – which is why the trees and wings in the images go over and out of the lines of the square of the image.
Music
To practice using premier pro, and to have a little fun, we made a parody of a song. At the time, I had just recently watched a couple of J-Dramas, something that I both love and hate in equal measure – so I thought it would be funny if I made my parody a rant expressing my displeasure. The song that I chose to parody was the original Pokemon theme song. I would provide lyrics, but this rant was a rather spur-of-the-moment thing; I had guidelines, but no set script as to what I wanted to say.
Animation
For the animation unit, we used skills that we learned from the previous unit and applied them here to make our projects.
Walk Cycle Composition
For this project, the point was to practice making a walk-cycle animation. We were expected to make both a digital walk cycle animation, as well as a physical/puppet-based walk cycle animation. The character I made for this project was inspired by the Japanese Oinarisama, a deity who’s divine messenger is the fox. The character’s name is Nai, and I ended up reusing her later not only for this project but for the short narrative assignment in English as well.
For this project, we started with the puppet animation. We used wires to make the armature, and a combination of clay, cloth, and other objects to fill in the shapes and add the details of the puppet.
Then came the time to make the actual animation. Using the puppet and Dragonframe, I took a stop-motion animation of Nai taking two steps.
Next, we had to work on the digital animation. We had multiple options as to how we could animate – this time, instead of using the frame-by-frame animation that I did for the phenakistoscope project, I instead used a video layer to make the animation. From this experience I learned that walk cycles take a ridiculously long time to animate – but I opted in to animating one again later for another project, so I’m not quite sure if I really learned the lesson.
Afterwards, for the final composition, we had to put the two animations together. I chose to make the background of the final composition a Japanese temple, as Nai was inspired by Oinari-sama’s messenger animal.
Lip Sync Project
The lip sync project in animation was one where we practiced making the mouth movements match an audio of our choice. For fun, I thought I would use the audio from the anime “Jujutsu-kaisen”. For the characters I decided to use two of my old original characters that I don’t use that often anymore – I thought it would be nice to breathe some life back into the characters by using them in this project.
Visual Narrative Animation
This was the final project of the Narrative unit, and it was also my favorite. For this project, we split into groups of four, and in that group of four we got to animate a story – the contents of which could be whatever we wanted. As a group, we decided to make a story about a witch trying to summon herself a girlfriend for Valentine’s day, and each day before the actual date that she tries summoning she fails in some way.
This project took much longer than we initially anticipated, and ended up being longer (a whole 3 minutes) that expected, but I’m very happy with how it turned out!!
The day I animated was the first day of the five, and day five we all worked on together, so I contributed there as well. I mentioned earlier that there was a second project in which I chose to animate a walk cycle. It was this project. It took a very long to animate, (took me the longest to animate, actually, out of everything I made), and it only shows up for about three seconds.
If I were to do this again, I would do my best to not overestimate my abilities.
