Title: The Knight and the Princess
Initial Main Idea: I wanted to create a fun story with two princesses. It started when I was brainstorming different ideas, but when an 8 bit song started to play, I suddenly had a strong impulse to create a story that involved two princesses. These two princesses were close. They hung out at the garden before the dragon came and burned it down. The tall princess grabs a bucket in order to dose the fire out, but the chubby princess is captured. The tall princess then begins her quest to save the chubby princess from the dragon.
Source of Idea and Importance: The source of the idea came from an 8 bit song. At first, just briefly, I thought of a princess saving a prince, but then I was just enraptured by the idea of two princesses instead (which will later be changed to a feminine knight and a princess). There was something about this story that fueled my very being. Maybe it's a reflection of the people I've been around, maybe it's due to the lack of happy endings with homosexual love stories, maybe it's because of all the different types of people I've seen out in the world, BUT I just couldn't not do it. I feel like it was a combination of things that really pushed this idea out.
Key Emotion/Experience for Audience: Satisfied; thrilled; happy; excited
Brief Synopsis: Golden knight goes on a quest to the mountain to save the princess from a greedy dragon.
Theme Discovered: True love comes in any form? I don't know, that sounds a bit forced. I mean, the way I see it is that it doesn't really matter what gender you could fall in love with. Your savior could be a kickin' ass woman, or maybe you could love someone who doesn't identify with a gender. Maybe you end up liking a non-masculine man, and that's okay. Love isn't restricted to the heterosexual norms.
Strengths of Film: The bucket being used as the weapon. I would also say that the secondary animation was also a strength (such as the fire burning and the panning). I also feel that the story itself (although overused) was really strong. Especially when others were really interested in seeing the end product.
Problem Areas: One of the problem areas would the consistency of the knight. Switching from gold armor to brown armor probably wasn't the best idea. During production, my main concern was having the character stick out from the environment, but I didn't want brown armor to be against the brown town. But I also didn't want the yellow armor to be lost against the golden background at the end.
Another problem area would be the dragon fight scene. The fight scene was condensed especially because of time. I would also say sound is definitely something that needs to be worked on in this film. (Also the ending, I should make the bucket more apparent around the dragon's snout).
Process, Discoveries, and Frustrations: There was so much thumbnailing. I just remember drawing and redrawing the characters until I got the right feel for them. I know for the knight (previously known as the tall princess), the inspiration was drawn from tough firewomen. I thought about the types of tools that they could've used (an axe being one of them), but then I thought of a bucket because fire(wo)men put fires out. So, I definitely decided to look for different types of inspiration rather than just pure medieval settings. Also, things on paper may look much better than the end product.
One of the frustrations I had was when I was working on the project, I would accidentally hit the light source and start the whole scene again from scratch because I couldn't get the light back to the way it was. Also finding out that I should've made more assets was also killer. But it really did push me to use the assets I did have and trying to find the right way to use them.
I think this film allowed me to also understand how to condense story plots without losing the main essence of the plot.
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