Introduction

During the second and third quarters of the 2017-2018 school year, we had the Narrative unit. It focused on telling a compelling story without the use of dialogue, and the projects were all based on the short story we wrote in English. In Animation, I created a 45-second animation based on my English story, and in Design, I created a hybrid animal based off of the main character in my story.

Flash Fiction

When a lonely clock-maker tries to discover the secret of time, he finds out how dangerous it really is to mess with something you don’t understand…

Time Keeps Moving Forward

Time is a construct of human imagination. There is no such thing as seconds, minutes, hours. Time is convenient. People like it when things are convenient, but Mr. Finn hates convenience. He wants to understand. He wants to understand time to fix his work, and to fix himself.

1843, New York City. On one empty street stood a lonely little shop where a certain old man lived. Children play in the empty streets, and as they run past the store, one little boy peeks into the window. He sees Mr. Finn sitting at his desk, a screwdriver in his right hand and a small electronic machine in the left. A clock.

Squinting his eyes, the boy can see that the numbers are backwards on the clock. Now he understood what everyone meant when they said that Mr. Finn wasn’t getting any business. After all, no one would buy a clock that runs backwards. The boy’s friends call him, and he runs along after them, completely forgetting about the poor man that worked in that forgotten shop. Mr. Finn’s gaze never turned away from the reversed clock. A reversal of time. He closes up the last bolt and then sets it down on the desk. With the push of a button, the clock turns on.

Time keeps moving forward.

He mentally curses to himself and snatches up the clock, stepping out of his shop and tossing it across to the other side of the street, hearing the clinking sound of its metal parts as it hit the concrete. He turns around and heads back inside, leaving the poor machine just lying on the edge of the opposite side of the street. Still ticking.

Time is a fickle mistress. She was playing with him, toying with him, knowing that he cannot crack her secret, yet she still tempts him. Stealing his days and years so he only pays attention to her.

Time keeps moving forward.

Evening arrived, and the clock was still ticking. Faintly, but it was still there. Mr. Finn could almost hear that faint sound in his head, forcing him to get up from his desk and walk over to the door. He stepped out into the dark, the sunny day having turned cloudy within just a few hours. Another one of her tricks. However, as he steps into the street, just on the edge of his hearing, Mr. Finn hears the skidding of a car and realizes the mistress’s cruellest trick of all.

People gather around as red stains the streets, droplets of rain starting to fall from the sky.

The clock that lies on the road gives its final tick, then stops. Time keeps moving forward.

Hybrid Animal Illustration

Understanding the Unknown

I created this drawing this image based on my flash fiction story. It takes place in the 1800s, and it’s about an old man named Mr. Finn who is trying to figure out how time works. However, he cannot seem to get anywhere and is losing business in his clock shop. One day, he tosses one of his clocks out onto the street in frustration, and the clock ends up almost breaking. Later in the day, when he goes to retrieve the object, he steps into the street unknowingly and loses his life when a vehicle hits him. It was only then that the broken clock stops ticking to signal the end of the clock-maker’s life.

The process of making this drawing began with me selecting three animals that matched up with my main character’s personality. The main body is that of a leopard, because leopards are known for being solitary animals, especially as they mature. On the back of the leopard is the shell of a tortoise to represent him being a hermit and locking himself away from his world to focus on his work. The final animal I chose was an owl, adding its wings to the main body and the beak in place of the mouth. Owls are thought to be very intelligent creatures, just like Mr. Finn. I gave my character a monocle, bowtie, and pipe to give off the feeling that he was old and sophisticated. I set my character in the background of a library, because of his desire to learn more about time, and a library is a place of knowledge. This allowed me to use linear perspective on the bookshelf to make the drawing appear less flat. The most difficult part of the process was adjusting the shell and wings on the animal so that they matched the leopard’s position. I am quite pleased with the finishing result of my work, although if I could fix something, it would be the spots on the leopard to be more realistic.

Narrative Animation

In animation, rather than choosing the retell the story of the old man, I instead told it through the perspective of an omnipotent being who watches over time and all the events that occur as a result of it.

The Mistress of Time must never interfere with events that are meant to happen…