Exploration and Pre-Production by Sundeep Kaur Panag

Case study: Grave of the Fire Flies   Storyline: Grave of the Fireflies” (1988) is an animated film telling the story of two children from the port city of Kobe, made homeless by the bombs. Seita is a young teenager, and his sister Setsuko is about 5. Their father is serving in the Japanese navy, and their mother is a bomb victim; Seita kneels beside her body, covered with burns, in an emergency hospital. Their home, neighbors, schools are all gone. For a time an aunt takes them in, but she’s cruel about the need to feed them, and eventually Seita finds a hillside cave where they can live. He does what he can to find food, and to answer Setsuko’s questions about their parents. The first shot of the film shows Seita dead in a subway station, and so we can guess Setsuko’s fate; we are accompanied through flashbacks by the boy’s spirit. Objective: Death Isao Takahata shows us the humble opposite, that when times are tough what you need most is humility, patience and...

Today we were able to split our group into two so we could focus in the storyline and development of our film  we also thought it would be a good idea to create moodboards and short videos to see our styles and visualisation of what we want to create. 

In todays blog post I will be writing about the characterisation and themes explored through various films which I believe could be implemented within our storyline and characters. The current storyline produced by the screenwriting team explores the relationship of a brother and sister. Synopsis- in this post apocalyptic setting where all information disintegrated; technology, libraries, museum, and we see the sister alone in a desolate space, perhaps picking things up on her way home, having a conversation with her brother. and only at the end you realise her brother wasn't really there with her nor maybe even alive at all, she's reliving whatever she has left of him of video diaries. the innocence of a child and how they haven't been tainted by the world and its vices? What if the sister is a little girl looking for her older adult brother? That's why she seems so much more sane and not as affected as the rest of the world about it, ignorance is bliss, you...

Here is a quick idea of what what the script writing team created and from here we will start to develop ideas and looking into different case studies to supports and further strength this idea of 'knowledge is power' an developing the two characters. Ive already started to look into the characters and chose different case studies to look into.