Barry Purves

Barry Purves is an animator with a background in theatre who works predominantly in stop motion animation. I really enjoyed meeting Barry (again, as he was the person to hand me my award at MAF), as his talk focused on the telling of stories through animation, which is something I have always been interested in myself, so this held a lot of personal interest for me.

He had a lot to say about why we tell stories and he believes it is because we want to be noticed and we want to be remembered. He also believes that stories are something we tell when we don't have a mask to hide behind, as we can use the characters within that story as our mask instead to aide us in the storytelling. When telling a story you should strive to find a mask that liberates you to help you tell your story in the best way possible.

With that in mind, he went on to tell us how playing with the structure of a story is something that we should embrace rather than shy away from. By embracing the artifice, it allows you to think of different ways to tell your story other than in a straight forward fashion. If you are able to avoid using a straight forward structure, it will help create a good story. Finding the right language to tell your story will help to make it more believable to an audience and will also help you to emotionally connect with the audience, making them feel like a part of the story.

During his visit, Purves showed us a number of animations he has done throughout his career. However, the one that stuck out to me the most was Plume. The short is about surviving a trauma and embracing change after trauma, but it was not the story line that drew me into this animation. It was in fact the way that Purves had managed to tell the story with only a few puppets and light. Whilst watching the short, Purves reminded us that we should considered absolutely everything when telling a story through animation, as everything (lighting, colours, editing, etc) tells the story. Not only this, but the characters within the story and how they are designed are also important. One of the most important features of a character are its eyes, as these are where all of the emotion is kept, and this will help you to tell your emotional story and tell the audience how the character is feeling.

Still from Plume

The number of characters also has an effect on your story. If you can, you should cut the number of characters and keep them to a minimum, as this will help to keep your story clear and the audience won't get confused. When it comes to movement you should always think dynamically, as movement also tells our story. For instance, if you wanted to create an eerie, disturbing atmosphere surrounding a character, as good way to do this would be to make his movement 'janky' and have them blink out of sequence. 

Overall, I found this talk to be extremely beneficial as I have learnt a lot about visual storytelling that I hadn't even considered before. The key things that I have taken away from this is that storytelling isn't just about what happens, it's about how you tell it too. Finding the right language to tell your story plays a significant role in how an audience will respond to what they are seeing. And finally, I shouldn't be afraid to embrace the artifice or play around with the structure of a story, as these things can make a story stronger if done successfully.