The Pitch

The Task-

Create a 15-25 second animation that ‘Evokes Emotion’. 

My Team-

Sarah, Clare, Yazz, Holly, Moi. 

^photo cred to Holly!

We began the ideation process by thinking of the various emotions we would like to convey in our animation, and the ones we instantly connected with were Nostalgia and Humour. Thinking a little deeper, we knew we wanted to create an animation that taught a moral tale, with a deep implicit meaning.

After a morning of ideation and brainstorming…and MANY subway cookies, we came up with our final idea. When I think of the word nostalgia, the first thing that comes to mind is childhood. From here we began to think about the various toys that we played with when we were younger, and we all agreed that we had the wooden peg toy. The basis of the toy being that you had a wooden box with shaped holes on each side and a lid on top; the goal, to fit the correct wooden peg shapes into the correct holes. The great thing about this toy is that it stayed popular over many generations, so the story would be accessible and understandable to all.

The story kind of wrote itself from there on..

TITLE- Fitting In.

Our characters would be the various shaped pegs that fit into the box. The box has just been left in the roof space by a parent (the child has grown too old for it). As the door closes, and the lights in the roof space go out, multicoloured lights (including Christmas lights left in a decorations box) turn on in the toy box to a little cheer of excitement. For these toys, they finally have their freedom, they are now adults. Music starts to play as the characters peer around the side of the box. The audience now grasps that the box is like a club to the characters (note:our play on the real BOX nightclub in Belfast).

The front doors to the club will be a circle hole and a star hole (for the VIP’s), and all of our characters, bar one, will be cylindrical. One by one, they are let into the ‘club’ by the bouncer (who is a triangle of course…he’s edgy). The camera pans out and reveals an anomaly, a little cuboid, standing excitedly in the middle of the queue. His turn comes to get into the club, but no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t fit into the cylindrical hole. He is turned away by the bouncer and walks away, dejected.

We follow as he walks into the distance, while in the background, the audience can see the lid of the box being opened by lots of little cylinder characters. One whistles to the cuboid, and he turns around to see his friends becoming him over. Showing that you don’t have to conform to the regular shape, the cylinders either turn him over and fit him into their doorway, or let him jump in through the roof.

To end, we cut back to the first shot of the lights in the roof space, showing that all has returned to normal. Role credits.

We presented the idea to the class, and both Conánn and our classmates loved the idea! Yay! … Well Conánn said he ‘nearly loved’ it…which to us pretty much means loved.