My favorite assignment during the Visual Storytelling class I took at The Animation Collaborative was boarding out a short story conveying the meaning of a single word. To prevent from explicitly mentioning the word, we weren’t allowed to use any dialog. We simply had to communicate it through action and emotion. Our classmates would then have to guess what our word was after we pitched our boards in order to evaluate how effective our story was at visually communicating our word.
For my word, I drew upon my own personal experiences as a gay man looking for love in a big city while hopping around bars with my friends. I’m sure everyone’s had those moments when they see someone special from across the room. They catch you staring, and suddenly your immobilized by fear and anxiety, even though they return your gaze with the warmest smile you’d ever seen. You attempt to build the courage to approach, and you might share a few more charged yet ephemeral glances, but before that frozen moment has time to thaw, it’s quickly sublimed and that person and all of your hopes float away into the air.
The rest of the night you’re standing still, locked in time inside your head, wishing you had smiled back, or simply said... “Hi.”
The story is called “Blue” for obvious reasons, but also because I feel it perfectly describes the mood of a night when serendipitous opportunities were missed. I chose to draw simple figures with simple line work because I wanted the focus to be on the atmosphere, emotion, and action of the scene - but I also think it makes the narrative more accessible since it is devoid of gender and identity.
Blue and Red could be anyone. They could be everyone. I know who they are to me, but who are they to you? Can you guess what my word for this story was?
I have half a mind to turn this into a full-fledged animatic one of these days...