Story Story Stor - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 17

Now that the plot was in place and working with the theme and the characters, I was faced with how to
work it to add both a hook and a turn .
The hook is something at the beginning of the animation that draws your viewers in. It gets them to commit to
the story. It could be as simple as something immediately funny, creepy, beautiful, or sad, depending on which
way your project is going. It could be a particularly lifelike facial expression, given by a well-animated character.
Or, if you already have a reputation as an animator, it might simply be your name in the opening titles that gets
someone to trust you as a storyteller.
In The Beast , I knew that the action would start slow and build, so it could not begin in full animal versus
baby battle mode. A baby picture then, something most people are familiar with, but with a twist: the baby
is ugly. Not disfi gured ugly, but Oh dear Lord I'm glad that's someone else's child ugly. That look, contrasted with
what people usually see in a picture of that sort, yet prominently displayed in a nice frame on a wall, should
be enough to get the viewer to commit to seeing more.
For many animations, and for your fi rst project, a surprise will work nicely for a hook. Make the audience
think one thing for a moment, then show them something different. I'm not talking about an Aqua Teen
Hunger Force style non sequitur. Instead, it often works to show the viewer something brief that sets up one
expectation but delivers something different, as long as that delivery still makes sense. People like to be pleas-
antly surprised.
At this point in The Beast , we have the characters and a general sense of the action in place, as well as a hook.
To satisfy the action and theme, I needed an appropriate turn.
The turn is the punch line of your comedy. It is the last, ironic revelation of your tragedy. It is the fi nal, hor-
rible fate of your gothic horror. It is the resolution of your person versus the universe tragic-horror-comedy.
In The Beast , the turn comes when the mother tells the Beast that she can't stay angry at him because he is
too cute and the viewer goes “Wha-?!” The camera cuts to the framed picture shown at the beginning, pull-
ing back to reveal that it was in fact the mother's baby picture. We see several shots of her growing up and
changing her looks into her present splendor, and realize, hopefully, that the way that we have seen the Beast
this whole time is completely different from the way she has seen him.
Your turn does not need to be that complex, but it should in some way give satisfaction to the characters, the
action, and theme, all at once. Creating the proper turn for your short animation story will probably be the
most diffi cult part of the story creation process. There are certainly a lot of constraints to meet.
If you can't come up with something that satisfi es your sense of the story, here are questions to ask yourself
that can spur some new ideas:
● Are the decisions of your characters driving the action or are they merely tossed around by circumstance?
If character-based decisions drive the action, then ask yourself how the characters would resolve things if
they were creating the story. If your characters are not driving the action, then consider “circumstance/
the universe/fate/God” to be a character, and ask it the same question.