Reading: Ideas For The Animated Short - Chapter 1

I've been struggling a bit with developing my project idea. Therefore I decided to do some further reading into getting ideas to get some inspiration. I found the pdf version of the book Ideas For The Animated Short: Finding and Building Ideas by Gary Schumer and Karen Sullivan. The first chapter was Story Background and Theory.

Important elements of story:

• Character
• Goal 
• Conflict (between character and goal)

Other elements to consider

• Location
• Inciting moment (something unexpected happens)
• Story question
• Theme - deeper message e.g. love conquers all
• Need - character needs to learn something to achieve goals
• Arc
• Ending/resolution

Examples of conflict

• brains vs brawn
• rags to riches
• good vs evil
• role reversal
• courage and survival

Films often have primary, secondary and tertiary conflict

Themes

Three main categories:

1. Physical needs
2. Mental needs
3. Spiritual needs

Within this: food; shelter; security; acceptance; stimulus; love and order

Think about how character may react to situations different than we would ourselves

Short films:

• Dont overcomplicate
• One theme/concept and one conflict (that intensifies/gets worse)
• One or two characters
• One or two locations

Response:

As I was reading the chapter I created brainstorms to try and develop my own ideas in line with Schumer and Sullivan's guidelines.

The means of conflict that stood out the most to me were "quest", "rags to riches" and "courage and survival". I think that "quest" would work as the "primary conflict", since the main character will go on a quest to find her family. Instead of using the "rags to riches" narrative, this would more likely be subverted in my own narrative, as the city of Paris went from being an economic success to a crumbled society. There will almost be elements of "courage and survival" within my story, as the main character will overcome the "environmental struggle" of the post-apocalypse.