Stories & Characters to Capture Hearts and Engage Minds [Oi Conference 2018]

Stories & Characters to Capture Hearts and Engage Minds

Heather Wright, Executive Producer, Aardman Animations

Heather Wright talked to the audience at Oi Conference about the creation of stories and characters by Aardman Animations. For the purposes of the talk she used their 360 Google Spotlight Story – Special Delivery animation to demostrate how to create stories & characters to capture hearts and engage minds.

What does a story need?

There are three things that a story needs:

• location
• situation
• character

Characters need personality. Heather talked about how characters are just like us and it is important to consider how characters react to different situations and how they react to the story that develops. This can clearly be seen as the story in Special Delivery develops.

The story develops out of the situation is based on the characters and the emotion tied to those characters.  The Special Delivery story has many layers and while the video only runs for 3-4 minutes there is actually 47 minutes of story time therefore it can be watched again multiple times. The different stories interplay with each other.

If you haven’t already seen this – it is worth a watch. make sure you move around the screen.