Nuclear Warfare and Animation as a form of storytelling.

Places abandoned due to nuclear attacks.
Some have remained abandoned ever since, including:
  • Chernobyl.
  • Kopachi.
  • Opachychi.
  • Pripyat.
  • Poliske.
  • Tarasy.
  • Velyki Klishchi.
  • Yaniv.

I think it’s still a completely terrifying reality that there are still places and people on this earth that have seen and suffered by the hands of nuclear warfare. I think sometimes in this generation people are so caught up on their phones and social media. Being able to put a rose coloured filter over their existence and forgetting the devastation and human suffering that have and continue to happen on this planet.

Animation is a form of storytelling, and I think me and Hannah want to not only create an animation, we want to remind people of the horrors that have taken place.

Image result for nuclear towns abandoned

Image result for nuclear towns abandoned

Image result for nuclear towns abandoned

Image result for nuclear towns abandoned

Historical Inspiration

http://www.awf.or.jp/e1/korea.html

Kimiko Kaneda: courtesy of Taisuke Katsuyama
During the Sino-Japanese war Korean women with Japanese women were sent to comfort stations which the Japanese military set up in various places of occupied China. As the war expanded into the Pacific-Southeast Asian region, many Korean women were sent there too.

It appears that first prostitutes were recruited from Korea to go to comfort stations abroad. Later daughters of poor families were recruited by various means. It is known that frauds in the name of good jobs began to be practiced from this time. There are testimonies that girls were recruited against their own will by coaxing and intimidating. From Korea girls under 21 years old were taken to comfort stations, which was prohibited in Japan. Among them there were even girls who were 16 or 17 years old.

Historical Inspiration

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30933718

Children prisoners at Auschwitz, photographed on orders of Josef Mengele

osef Mengele was an assistant to a well-known researcher who studied twins at the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt – he started working at Auschwitz in May 1943.

There he had an unlimited supply of twins to study, and he wouldn’t get in trouble if they died.

According to Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, author of Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments, hundreds of children were used in Mengele’s experiments.

“I found a record of a prisoner doctor and bacteriologist who was forced to work for Mengele that there were 732 pairs of twins,” he says, and suggests the doctor was interested in genetics. “I think Mengele might have been interested in the inheritance of the propensity to having twins.”

He believes many of the twins survived Auschwitz, although he thinks Roma twins were almost certainly killed.

Sourced from the BBC.

I am aware that subject matter like Auschwitz is hard to stomach, but it is something that I feel I have enough understanding that I also have a right to remind people of the dispicable things that have happened on this planet. As someone who was once an advocate for spreading my own understanding and visit to Auschwitz for the Holocaust Educational Trust I see no harm in animation taking on many different forms.

https://www.het.org.uk/lessons-from-auschwitz-programme

Image result for chloe cameron-hughes auschwitz

Me giving a presentation at The Forum Norwich.

http://norwichhistory.blogspot.com/2014/04/learning-from-auschwitz.html

New Storyboard

Final Storyboard

I had to be realistic, I really loved a lot of the scenes in my original storyboard draft but it just wouldn’t have worked out time-wise as I had so many scene changes that weren’t necessary for communicating across my message for my fable. I think that is the key thing to remember that this project is to communicate a message/moral and therefore I do need to be thinking how I can make sure that I have enough of the key scenes for the story to be conveyed clearly.

So for a while, I was contemplating having quite an interesting title for my opening, I wanted to have my young character asleep in the background with her backpack up close to the camera, then the next scene would be a close up on the backpack which would have the word ‘Yugen’ written on it. The screen would then turn black and the story would begin. As much as I loved this idea and if I do decide to come back and work on this animation I will try and incorporate this back in, however I realised time-wise it was not to work having such an extended opening and then have the rest of the scenes especially the ones at the end have enough  time to get across the central message of the fable.

storyboard final 1.jpg

storyboard final 2.jpg

storyboard final 3.jpg