Principles of Character Animation Unit-The Button Girl Beats Sheet

Firstly, we made some changes to the settings of the village compared to the original story.
The final village setting is:
The villagers are overly obsessed with equality and uniformity. This leads people to suppress their emotions and act in the same way as others do. And the villagers did this to ensure that their appearance would not be too obviously different from that of others. So they replaced their faces with buttons to maintain consistency.
In terms of behavior, due to long-term emotional suppression, the villagers’ inner selves have become distorted. They would drag their dolls around.
The doll represents the inner world of the villagers. Because the villagers’ inner selves were filled with negative emotions, the dolls also became ugly and distorted. The doll possesses the characteristic of having a shadow. It can change its size at will without having a fixed shape.
The protagonist, in order to not stand out in the village, also tends to suppress her emotions excessively, which has led to her doll being quite terrifying as well. However, the protagonist was not completely assimilated. When she returned home, she would do the things she liked and would dress her doll according to her own preferences.

In the feedback during the tutorial, it was mentioned that the character of the main character in our project playing with dolls in the garden was not reasonable under the extreme rule-following in the village. The teacher suggested that we change some parts of the story.

In Act 1, we changed the beginning of the story to have the protagonist and the villagers walking in a line on the road and then going home in an orderly manner. In this section, the appearances of the villagers, the main character and their dolls can be displayed. This point enables the audience to understand the location where the story takes place. Moreover, the audience can notice that the villagers all look exactly the same, and their dolls also have the same characteristics. This indicates that the people here are overly obsessed with uniformity.

Next, the main character returns home to confirm that all the villagers have returned. After that, she picks up the doll and replaces its buttons and eyes with those she likes. This plot shows the differences between the protagonist and her doll and the villagers.

At the first turning point of the story, in Plot 1, one of the villagers doesn’t go and just stares at the main character from outside the window, which leads to the second act of the story. The villagers gather outside the window, and their dolls enter the main character’s house through the door gap.

The original plot should have been that the villagers just bumped into the doors and windows, but in the feedback, we were told that the character conflict in this part was not sufficiently impactful. Most students and teachers believed that this was not enough to cause the main character to yield to the villagers’ decision. So we came up with the shadow monster setting in the story I initially created, giving the doll the ability to compress its size like a liquid. Thus, there was a plot where the doll entered the main character’s house through the door gap and surrounded her.

In the second turning point – Plot 2. I propose that the main character should retreat and bump into a table and fall down after being surrounded. This would cause the villagers’ dolls to climb onto her and start eating her. I think this will make people feel even more stressed. Under the pressure of this kind of being eaten, the protagonist removed the button eyes from her doll, and at that moment, the villagers’ dolls also stopped attacking. The reason for this design is that the villagers are extremely meticulous about consistency, and the doll represents the embodiment of their inner thoughts. When the protagonist does something that meets the villagers’ expectations and removes the button eyes that he likes from the doll, the villagers no longer show hostility towards “their own kind”. So the children of the villagers also stopped attacking.

At the end of the story – Act 3. The protagonist walked to the door and crushed a button in her hand, then entered the line of the villagers. This further indicates her submission to the village’s rules.

However, in this part, the teacher gave feedback saying that they hoped there could be a slight twist, and they wanted the story not to be a depressing one about people completely submitting under oppression. So at the turning point of the story – Plot 3. We designed a shot where the protagonist hid a button, had it peek out of her hand, and then pulled it back. This expresses that the protagonist did not completely submit to the village’s rules; rather, she had buried her thoughts deeper than before.