Chosen Final Idea

After a long process of trying to develop an idea that would answer the title Anxiety and the Subconscious mind i at last came to an idea that i combined from two of my storyboards i made (during the idea development.) I actually had quite a bit of trouble throughout this time trying to create a story that would express anxiety and the subconscious mind well enough - One thing that I was positive on however was that I wanted to use a physical metaphor to express the anxiety (which would explain to the audience how the hidden anxiety controls the subconscious mind.) At the start of the week I looked into water (based on my dreams that I often have about water flooding -or the presence of water being threatening and dangerous. This immediately made me think of how anxiety can make you feel. However after exploring this idea I felt that animating the water may have been very difficult for my short time length and I also wanted to look into some other ideas.

The final idea

The animation shall begin with the main (lets call her 'worrier') who is highly anxious, she worries about 'what if' scenarios so much that she begins to generally feel fear over theses thoughts in her head. The animation starts with the 'worrier' talking to a friend about a particular worry. As she is explaining and becoming more and more anxious - we suddenly hear a 'ping' sound that only the 'worrier' hears. When she looks in her bag, she discovers the source of the sound which is a small round object. As soon as she sees it she closes her bag, holds it tight against her body and runs off home. We then see her enter her bedroom - where she slams the door shut (locking her self from the rest of the world) and walks over to her chest-draws. She puts the round object into one of the draws, at the same time we can see a group of similar looking balls inside of the draw as well. She then shuts the draw and stares down, thinking about the unknown object inside of the draw before turning and walking away. We see her slowly escalate into a fearful state as she sees hundreds of balls all stuffed or hidden all over her room. However because she is so distracted by this army of unknown objects she trips over one hidden under her rug. She turns around to see what she feel over,  and as she pays attention on it, the round object begins to open and long tentacles like arms begins attacking her. The 'worrier' frantically tries to escape, but instead feels she must try to defend herself and so pulls the tentacles out from the floor. Although her small peace of mind is crushed when she looks up to see the whole room worth of round objects open up and hundreds of tentacles all aiming for her are set free. She is unable to fight them of before they all tangle around her and she is left damaged and in shock on the floor.

The idea is trying to symbolise that anxiety shouldn't be kept as a secret, in addition it shouldn't be ignored because before you know it all these worries and fears will soon creep up on you and pour all the emotions hidden on you at once. Below is the first rough storyboard that I made for this idea. It was originally two separate storyboards, but i photocopied them and cut them out and rearranged into one. They actually worked really well as one idea. I want to think about the different opening to the animation as I don't want this to take up to much of my time as its only a set up to the main event. (I don't want to waste lots of my time animating a scene unnecessarily.)

Author's own

Above is an animatic that i created to learn more about the pace of this animation.