After weeks of mostly hard work, my animation is finally finished, rendered, and burned onto two dvds. So I figured this would be the perfect time to update the blog...
I have managed to stay quite true to my original key narrative points, however I have had to scrap the trying to help people point, because of time restraints, and also because it flowed perfectly well without it in there.
So it now goes along the lines of a man leaving his house, seeing that everything is good in the world, he goes to work and has a normal day. As he is leaving work a link in the chain which holds on his visor breaks and falls off. The man then sees the world for how it really is, and runs away scared. When he gets to his house, he looks through the visor, and sees how he'd been living a lie. He tosses the visor to the ground, and walks off into the rain. He sits in a cave in the hills overlooking his town. The girl who he works with suddenly appears next to him, and sits down. End.
I have tried consistently throughout the animation to include references to Plato's allegory. For example, the chains which hold the visor onto the people's head represent the chains holding the prisoners in the cave. The cave itself also stands as a pretty obvious representation, however I have swapped it around with the prisoners leaving the cave to achieve enlightenment with the man going into the cave once he has seen the world for how it really is. Lastly, when the girl appears in the cave, you first see her shadow, which is reminiscent of the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.
In terms of music, I bought 3 copyright free tracks from AKM Music (akmmusic.co.uk) which represented the three main emotions I wanted to portray; calm and happy, terror and shock, and melancholy. I edited these tracks together with some free sound effects which I thought would help add to the animation, such as machinery sounds in the factory, and sounds of rain and fire etc.
That'll do for now, I'll update more later on
