Starting Animation, Background and Storyboards

Finally, I came to piece together a short, quite metaphorical, story about two squirrels' ways of trying to save another squirrel being chased by a fox. One squirrel is on a high branch with a bundle of acorns it has saved over time. They're throwing them down at the fox in hopes that it will give up and run off, leaving it's wounded prey alone. The main squirrel doesn't have any acorns but tries to grab one from another high branch. It tries not as much as it could have and makes a small mistake in doing so. This makes them feel useless and so they run back in to their hole in the warm tree with their sleeping family. Comforting and away from the outside world. Of course, the squirrel above runs out of acorns and without any help from anybody else they aren't able to save the squirrel from the fox.

I planned this story very specifically due to the messages of what I wanted to present. The acorns represent wealth and money and the tree represents the class ladder. The squirrel with more acorns and is higher up on the tree, away from the bottom shows someone who has the money to give to the sorting out of the issue which they are far away from experiencing. The hole in the tree summarises the comfort of privilege but also it is this that keeps us away from the cold reality outside. The one acorn that the guilty squirrel goes after is the little bit of money they have to work for and in some cases they can't use this or get a hold of it. By crawling out of the hole, the squirrel is not used to it and though squirrels can climb trees, the squirrel's mistake of slipping on the bark and almost falling down is enough to make this rather timid, shy and not very confident person give up in the idea they have already screwed up. Every little helps but surely the person with all the money has more power and ability than the squirrel who hides away back in the comfort of the lucky environment they have. By the time this squirrel's energy and nuts run out, the fox has already caught it's prey. I decided to make all the characters, except the fox, squirrels to show that they are, like humans, the same species and also they're on the same side. The fox is a very different creature not alien enough for them to not be unknown but also not familiar enough for them to be used to it.

I felt like the aim was to make sure although we see the guilty squirrel is upset and almost able to feel sorry for, the real victim is at the bottom of the tree. This is going through the mind of the guilty squirrel. It is not only that they feel bad for not doing enough but also bad that they take the time to feel sad about themselves rather than the person they should have saved.

I created a bundle of different storyboards and worked on backgrounds of inside, outside, the bottom and branches of the tree. I looked up images of squirrels and foxes to create simple character designs with the main animal features and got everything ready for animating on flash.

Most of the project was spent on using flash and animating the story. This went smoothly without any problems and I learnt how to get more comfortable with using the software which I lacked to do so in areas of the last project, so I feel like I achieved quite a lot.

I feel like this part of the project went at a nice pace. I thought about the ideas of the story enough to create something truly meaningful and yet was able to not make it too complex in what was being shown in the story. I feel as if perhaps the hole in the tree could have been closer to the squirrel on the ground and the fox. Although it's a small feature, it may have stuck closer to the message of the story in showing that the guilty squirrel is in the very middle of the tree, neither too far or close to the problem.