The Story: Orignal Cinderella and Movies

Talking about the story background of the project, Sharon suggesting me to read the original version of Cinderella's story. So I looked up the story on the internet and found some very interesting elements that I'm glad to use in my own project.

One is the pigeons who helped Cinderella to alight amongst the ashes. In the story, it's said that "(birds)odded with their heads and began pick", singing "The good into the pot,The bad into the crop." In my project, I simplified them into three chicks talking about Cinderella's wish.

Also in the story, there's a hazel-tree helping Cinderella when she begged "Shiver and quiver, my little tree,Silver and gold throw down over me". Here I drew 3 tree in the farm who can wave there leaves when them heart Cinderella's words.

I also watched Andy Tennant's Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). What impressed me was that her two sister didn't have to be ugly or really so bad. It's that they were so beautiful and proud made Cinderella think the ball will be a place to find happiness. So in my project I showed two girls dressed up with really glamour.

Reference:
1. Cinderella by The Brothers Grimm, translated by Margaret Taylor (1884)(http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/grimm/bl-grimm-cinderella.htm);
2. Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcj9fyx6DXI;

Storyboard Version 2.0

After the first version of the storyboard, I received a lot of suggestion from my supervisors and classmates. So I did these improvement for the 2rd storyboard:

1. Simplify the color in to 4, which will be blue for the usual items, orange for the animated focus characters, and black for lines and text, white for the background.

2. Remove the unrelated things and different style, because the screen of the website is small.

3. For the dressing part, add the way we use in children's dress book.

4. Use the style of water color and childly hand drawing.

Cinderella by Phil Porter

Last night I went to see the play of Cinderella, by Phil Porter in Dundee Rep. It's so amazing that all the children and adults I can see loved it.

There's many things that I can learn from the play.  First is the way it told the story, as written in the website, it recreate the story like this:

Cinderella works all day for her father in a floating retirement home for elderly magicians and their assistants. And when she’s not bailing out the family business, she’s bailing out the water! 

Back on dry land, the Queen announces that a ball will be held to find the dashingly handsome young prince a wife, but Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters are determined to ruin her dream of attending the Royal ball. 

With only the retirement home’s magicians to help her, who will work the magic Cinderella needs to get to the ball?

 I liked it because no matter how the background changed, it still focus on the magic and dreams, just as it said in the play "sometimes all you need is a little magic". Especially, it gave the characters some new dispositions. Cinderella was recreated as a girl no so weak, but still kind-hearted and have a strong sense of responsibility. She didn't go to the ball for the prince, instead she just wanted to be happy and beautiful for just one night. That's more understandable in nowadays. And the prince was someone who want to be "true me" and miss the simple but happy live before becoming a member of  nobility. And obviously, every audience loved its funny details.

For the stage, the play only had 3 scene: the ship(Cinderella's room and the magicians' dinning room), the castle. I think this is really intelligent because this covered the most famous part of the story already. In my project, I will also concentrate on the castle and Cinderella's room.

Another impressive thing I got from the play was to catch the audience's attention by casting a drop of light to a certain character on the stage. I can do it with HTML5, like the example I collected before on Normal Mapping with Javascript and Canvas.

There was one thing that really impressive me after the play. A lady asked her friend how she thought of this show, her friend said "I love it, it's happy, maybe because it's so easy to understand". That reminded once we talked about the definition of animation in  class, we looked back to a lot of early animations of producers such as Disney. Most of they are simple and just make you laugh. Nowadays, the development of technique allow the outcome of animation to have more possibility, but I think there's something that never change. That's take animation as a tool to write out what you see and feel from life, to recreate this into something simple and easy to accept, to help people better understand and pursuit something meaningful.

Something About a Magic Mirror

Tell Me, Magic Mirror!(Sorry, I couldn't find the artist)

I came across the idea of data visualisation about personal preference when I saw this picture last year.  I hope someday this project can really tell girls the ways to get beautiful be analysis the data of themselves. Anyway, what I want to talk about here is the relation among women, dress and mirror.

In the story of Snow White, the queens always wanted to get information about 'the fairest' from her magic mirror. In fact, she just wanted get admiration from it. As Woodward says in her book, the importance of a mirror is that 'Looking in the mirror is therefore a marriage of the intimate and the generic, as women consider their own dressed bodies in light of wider social ideals and expectations.' According to her theory, when a women find the girl in the mirror is exactly the one fits her imagination of herself and what she want the society to see as 'her', she will find this fits. That's why occasion,  body shape finess and preference colors are important factors when choosing the prefect dress.

That's why sometimes it's funny that we such a different 'me' in the mirror.

Can you spot your REAL shape? from dailymail.co.uk

In our last meeting, Dr. O'neill sent me an interesting website name Can you spot your real shape? This article describe an experiment that when looking at the same body shape, women see different shapes according to their expectation of themselves. So as for my project, I thing it's important that the user should tell the website some data of themselves before the advice about what 'fits' the user.

Another interesting question is that what will people usually do in front of a mirror? Here's something I read and find in life:
1. Really look at myself;
2. Try the clothes on, look carefully, turn around;
3. Take off the clothes, change to another one;
4. 2<-->3;
5. Smile when it looks good, or even dance with it;
6. Angry or disappointed when it doesn't fit, or even kick the mirror;
7. Talk to myself.


Reference:
Sophie Woodward(2007) Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford, Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

The Story of Cinderella

Cinderella Pumpkin Carriage

Once I was talking with Brian about my project, he gave me a good idea of digging into different versions of the story of Cinderella, and so I did.

First I watch some movie of Cinderella. One of them is Cinderella 1950 produced by Disney. I dont think much of this version, cause it pays too much attention to the mouses and the cat, which make me loose my patience. Another is Cinderella III A Twist in Time, also produced by Disney in 2007,  which post a question that if the slippers didn't fit Cinderella? Will the prince still fall in love with her? It's some kind of interesting that it make you really consider about the importance of the dressing to a woman.

Then I interviewed people from different country about their idea of Cinderella, this including friends from UK, New Zealand, China and so on. And found that most people learn about the story from the Disney movie, which means people have a similar concept of this story. When ask the question that Why do you think Cinderella wanted to go to the ball? Most of them thought it's because she wanted to meet the prince, or she was curious about the ball, or she wanted a change of her life.

I also read some books of Cinderella. Most children's books of the story are really simple and short, but one of them impressed me a lot. It's Cinderella told by C.S.Evans. The writer enriches the story with imagination of the detail, such as what people think in certain moments, but that means he also changes the story a lot. Anyway, it's funny to hear something different.