Principles of Character Animation Unit-The Button Girl Story Creation

After completing the mind map and the initial mood board, we decided to each create a story and a storyboard first.

This is a story I created.

This is a story about a girl who was excluded and suppressed, and who tried to solve her predicament in an incorrect way, only to be eventually consumed by her own malice.

I want to convey in this story that excessive rejection of differences can cause harm to others. Long-term suppression of emotions can lead to an increase in negative emotions. The behavior of venting one’s stress by assaulting others is also not advisable.

In this story, I have set the monster as the shadow of the girl. The shadow represents the negative emotions of the girl. As the girl’s emotions become more repressed and the maliciousness gradually increases due to the use of violence to relieve stress, the shadow will gradually grow larger and consume the girl.

This is a story created by Wendy.

This story tells of a puppet that gained life through the love of the protagonist and could gently turn over. The neighbor’s child saw this and screamed, calling her a “goblin baby”. The protagonist subconsciously hid the puppet behind his back. That night, the puppet ceased to move. The protagonist held the puppet in his arms and sang repeatedly. But it was discovered that the puppet no longer had a heartbeat; all that remained was a dampness – that was her silent tears.
The character designed by Wendy was a woman who was unable to have children. She used scraps of cloth, cotton wool and lullabies to sew a “cotton doll child”, and would hold her in her arms and sing softly every night.
This puppet child metaphorically represents the protagonist’s own thoughts and ideas. However, once they are criticized by others and not recognized, they no longer dare to express their thoughts. The protagonist’s thoughts vanished, and the puppet’s soul also disappeared.

This is the initial story we created by integrating the best ideas from each story and through discussion.

In this story, the protagonist lives in a village that highly values collectivism. Everyone has a doll that represents their inner self. However, due to the villagers’ extreme pursuit of uniformity, they exhibit consistent behaviors and appearances, while their inner emotions are also overly suppressed. The accumulation of negative emotions led to the fact that the children’s dolls in the village were all ugly and couldn’t move. The villagers would resort to violence against their dolls to express their emotions. They would drag the dolls across the ground. And because the protagonist did not overly suppress her emotions and did not follow the same pattern as the other villagers, her doll gradually came to have life.
This story tells of one day when the protagonist and the doll were playing in her own garden. The doll would perform some actions to express happiness. At this time, the villagers gathered around and criticized the protagonist and her doll. The protagonist felt the pressure and she took the doll home. After crying for a while at home, she made up her mind and transformed the doll into one like the other villagers.