Origami?

As our project begins to take shape, Nick and I have decided upon the main visual concept: Origami.

You may be thinking to your self, how does origami tie into Japanese internment camps? How are the two at all connected?

For our film opening, we decided to mix the concepts of the Chinese zodiac with the internment camps, resulting in a visually and emotionally beautiful piece... hopefully.
The film will open with close up and extreme close up shots of our young actress making origami animals. The animals will be folded out of newspaper that we will print with dates and headlines corresponding with the time period of the 1940's (it's all about the detail). These animals will include some of the following: ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, and rat. All of these animals represent the Chinese zodiac.

As the shots progress, an older woman, the actresses' older self, will be speaking about these animals in a voiceover. She will explain the story of the animals and why the order is significant. The shots during this time will correspond with what the actress is saying. Following the story of the zodiac, we are going to experiment with fading the older woman's voice into the little girl's voice as she begins to explain the second half of the concept. Here is the tentative script for this section:

I was born in the year of the rat, the first place winner, something I was always proud of. But I often asked my mother, "What happened to the cat after the rat threw him into the river? What place did he finish in?" "He didn't finish the race," my mother would say. It was the year of the horse, 1942, in the prime of World War II, when my family and I were seized from our homes and taken to the Manzanar concentration camp in central California. Stripped of everything we owned, it certainly didn't feel like we had finished in first. It didn't feel like we finished at all. Thousands of years ago, we had pushed the cat into the river, and now it felt like we were finally paying the price.

At the line, "It was the year of the horse, 1942, in the prime of World War II," the shots will change to the little girl sitting by a fence, similar to the one in yesterday's post. The final shots will be of the young actress playing with her origami animals by the fence in solitude.

Storyboarding will be our next endeavor... Stay tuned.