I have been thinking about making the stories that I cannot shoot, due to my limited resources, as some sort of animated interactive book...

I am working on some Goose Calisthenics

His range of motion is more or less what I expected; the tuba is the biggest limiting factor.

More things Disney Changed
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland lost it's disturbing fever dream qualities, to become sing-song silly and cute in Disney's Alice in Wonderland.

"Oh, don't bother me," said the Duchess; "I never could abide figures!" And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line :—

"Speak roughly to your little boy.  And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy,  Because he knows it teases." Chorus. (In which the cook and the baby joined):— "Wow! wow! wow!"

-Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Chapter 6

A. A. Milne's The House on Pooh Corner ended with Christopher Robin and Poo having a talk about how he was not going to be coming back any more because he was growing up

The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson ended with the little mermaid throwing herself into the sea and becoming sea foam because the prince married another woman.

I was asked to research when and why the filtering of children's stories started. This is something I started to look into at the beginning of the semester, but I was unable to find enough credible sources to back up my hypothesis.

A Spoon Full of Salt

Attitudes toward child rearing changed fundamentally after Dr. Spock's book in the late 1940s. His book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, was not the first "owner’s manual" for children, but unlike others, Dr. Spock emphasized constant encouragement with instilling a sort of "you can do or be anything" mindset in a child from an early age. His approach resonated in the American Post WWII society because we believed the economic boom we were experiencing was a sort of manifest destiny, rather than the result of the fact that we were the only industrialized nation that had not just had our manufacturing infrastructure bombed into rubble. The American middle class believed the economy and standard of living would just continue to grow forever, so they cultivated a belief in children that they would achieve all their dreams. The result is a society that does not believe in consequences that they cannot fix, and does not see the need to expose children to sadness, fear, or anger as if these are emotions future generations will not have to deal with.

The validity of the belief that quality of life would increase exponentially aside, removing half the spectrum of emotional colors from the palate of literary art that children are exposed to robs youth of some of the most powerful and beautiful gifts art can offer.

Spock, Benjamin. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946)

1. Watson, John Psychological Care of Infant and Child, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1928).

2. Holt, Luther Emmett. The Care and Feeding of Children, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1894).

One of the cut out bits...

I began to put together a number of examples of literature that had been sanitized, but I cut it because I was focusing on what I didn't want to do, instead of what I did.

The most offensive examples of vandalism of children’s classical literary art come from Disney. I am exemplifying Disney, not because they are bad, but because they are big. When Disney creates a rendition of a golden age children’s (Wiki 2) the audience is no broad, and popular it becomes the prominent form of the work in the mind and heart of the vast majority of the public; replacing the artist’s original creation. A few of my favorite works that have been declawed include; P. A. Travers’ Mary Poppins, A. A. Milne's The House on Pooh Corner, The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian, and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Mary Poppins

Travers’ Mary Poppins was eerie, cold, and she never showed any empathy. Michael described her impression on page 248 of Mary Poppins Comes Back "you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her. There was something strange and extraordinary about her – something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting." There was a fantastically disturbing event in the first Mary Poppins book when she snuck into the children’s room one night, steals the paper stars the children had been collecting, and pastes them into the sky with three surely sisters the children had met earlier while shopping in an odd back alley market. Mary Poppins never says good bye. When she leaves, the only warning is the number of pages in left in the book.

All the magnificently dark characteristics in Tracers’ books are sharply contrasted to the mood of Disney’s movie, in which she arrives to help the Banks family and teach them some songs. It is the family that did not say goodbye in Disney’s Mary Poppins, but only because they were so preoccupied with how happy and functional they had become. P. A. Travers wept through the world Premiere of Mary Poppins, asking “What have they done?” (Singh Web) 

Of the absurdist fiction I have become familiar with, Kafka's The Metamorphosis is the closest to my intent.

Statement of Concept as of 02/23/15

Western culture has a tendency to categorize emotions into positive and negative.  In researching child psychology and emotional impact, I stumbled across dozens of papers, spreadsheets, and multicolored diagrams segregating sad, angry, scared, happy and other emotional labels into categories of good or bad. Sad can be beautiful, and creepy can be mysterious and wonderful. Over the last century a lot of these "negative" experiences are disappearing from children's stories and, in many cases of what I consider to be a corporate vandalism of classical works of art, the stories are completely changed, removing the moral and the magic.

I am interested in subverting this trend and bringing back some of the lost “negative” elements in a series that is sad and peculiar with a simple nonsensical façade that turns into a complicated  personal message. My work is masquerading as a child's cartoon, but I am writing about the abandonment of youthful aspirations. I am incorporating emotionally heavy elements like sad endings, because a sad ending leaves someone wanting to change injustice, and appreciate the struggle of the meek. It is important that children hear these because loss is a reality children can and do handle all the time, and empathy is a virtue that should be fostered.

P. A. Travers is my new favorite author ever. Everything I am arguing, she already said.

·         "My parents, I knew, would never let me be drowned in ink or have my thumb cut off by the Great Long Red-Legged Scissors Man. And it is worth asking here, I think, why we grown-ups have become so squeamish that we bowdlerize, blot out, gut, and retell the old stories for fear that truth with its terror and beauty should burst upon the children. Perhaps it is because we have lived through a period of such horror and violence that we tremble at the thought of inflicting facts upon the young. But children have strong stomachs. They can be trusted with what is true." 

·         "You should trust the children; they can stand more than we can" 

·         "Nothing will persuade me, in spite of all his poetic protestations, that Lewis Carroll wrote his books for Alice, or indeed for any child. Alice was the occasion but not the cause of his long, involved, many leveled confabulations with the curious inner world of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Of course, when it was all over, when he had safely committed it to paper, he could afford a benignant smile and the assurance that it had been done for children. But do you really believe that? I don't" 

·         "a book that is written solely for children is by definition a bad book" 

·         "Think of Milne, think of Tolkien, think of Laura Ingalls Wilder—those books not written for children, but that children nevertheless read" 

·         "You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children; for if you are honest you have, in fact, no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one. And from time to time, without intention or invention, this whole body of stuff, each part constantly cross-fertilizing every other, sends up—what is the right word?—intimations" 

 Travers, P. A. "On Not Writing for Children" A Letter from the Author. Publication: Children's Literature, 10, no. 1. Publisher: Project Muse

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Travers_P._L._(Pamela_Lyndon)%2C.pdf?issn=15433374&issue=v04i0001&article=15_onwfc

I have 1 clever friend.

·         "The Grimms brought us caution tales and Kipling gave us the colonial adventures but what can you give middle class children in a safe and tame world to truly prepare them for the sad grey life of bookkeeping" 

-Jenn Chlebus (Facebook Chat 02/19/15 5:30 pm) 

I read Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and I am already familiar with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It seems a characteristic of existentialism that is also present in absurdism is an orientation from the human perspective.
The adult audience is examining the goose, and not identifying with him until after they understand and accept the premise.

I am researching how my work relates to absurdist fiction. I started from the Wikipedia page, and I have been reading The Absurd in Literature, by Neil Cronwell. From the Wikipedia page, I have followed links to nihilism, agnosticism, and existentialism. The last is probably the most relevant to my work as the characters are a personification of "the existential attitude, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world", but these are all new concepts to me, so I am still building an understanding.

New ending to the tuba goose series... Tuba-Goose goes to ComFest. After a long day of everyone understanding him, dancing with painted people, glitter, then night falls and it's empty Solo cups and crushing isolation once again. Tuba-Goose takes a good long look at the pond, then the sky, then the tuba. He leans forward, dropping tuba on the ground.

and the rest is obvious... I guess it always was.

I just couldn't accept it.

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out, "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm --- when --- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not much. They won't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm --- you know --- when I'm not doing Nothing, will you be here sometimes?
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," said Pooh.
"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."
Pooh thought for a little.
"How old shall I be then?"
"Ninety-nine."
Pooh nodded.
"I promise," he said.
Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw. "Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnesstly, "if I --- if I'm not quite ---" he stopped and tried again --- "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"

-A. A. Milne The House on Pooh Corner

Tuba-Goose

My objective with the Tuba-Goose Stories

I want the audience to learn a new appreciation for the absurd and find virtue in people who frustrate them.

Method

I am trying manipulate the audience into being annoyed and cynical, in a parallel with the antagonists, and then shift their emotions to wistful after they understand Tuba-Goose’s struggle. When they revisit or recall the story, they become one of the protagonists, understanding and accepting the absurd.

Scenarios

Day Job

• Tuba-Goose hijacks a hotdog stand.

A hot-dog vendor puts up a "back in 1 hour sign" and walks off talking on the phone. Tuba-Goose hops up onto the vendor's stool and starts to open the cart back up (only top of his tuba is visible, and the sound of rustling is heard). 

A man walks up and asks for a hot-dog with the works, with a $5 in his outstretched hand. Tuba-Goose's head pops up with the dog, slips it into the man's hand and snatches his money before he can react. Tuba-Goose shoves the money into the cart, his head pops back up, and he says "Henkuh". The man looks baffled as a mother walks up talking to her daughter. 

Her head is down, so she is unaware of what is going on. She says "We'll take 2 dogs with mustard, mayo, and"

She glances up as she is handing her money, realizing he is a goose, as she says "ketch..up...?''

Tuba-Goose snatches the money his head goes down, and the adults look at each other confused and down at the goose out of site in bewilderment. Tuba-Goose's head pops back up dropping the dogs on the counter one at a time. He honks "Heunkah", and the woman says "What is going on here?" 

A homeless man sleeping on a nearby bench says "He said have a nice day" the hobo pulls a newspaper back over his head muttering something about "bunch of morons", and  "trying to sleep here". 

Tuba-Goose says "Heunkuh", and the little girl grabs the dogs and says "Thank you, you too." she starts to walk off and her mother chases after saying, "DO NOT PUT THAT IN YOUR MOUTH!"

Animal Control sees the goose and tries to catch him to take the tuba off, because they think it is a piece of trash that he is tangled in. Tuba-Goose sees the 2 people slowly stalking toward him with a net, and he says "Henkah???" (a what the hell is the matter with you tone), they start coming faster and tuba goose runs off.

The hot-dog vendor returns to his cart (it is trashed; there are feathers ketchup goose footprints all over the place). He Says "What the h" (jump cut to black)

It's Cold, We're Old, That Sucks

• Tuba-Goose is trying to organize a protest against the cold weather. (He is a goose, they don’t really understand how winter works or protests). He enlists the aid of the residents of a retirement home (“we’re old, it’s cold, that sucks!”), but staff calls Animal Control. Tuba-Goose runs out, leaving the residents confused.

Acceptance

• Tuba-Goose goes to ComFest. After a long day of everyone understanding him, dancing with painted people, glitter, then night falls and it's empty Solo cups and crushing isolation once again. Tuba-Goose takes a good long look at the pond, then the sky, then the tuba. He adjusts the tuba, turns, and walks back down the path toward the suburbs.

I re-shot a lot of the scenes, and I have started putting together some limited animation for my storyboard.

I have re-recorded the sound track, and I am remixing the storyboard.

02/14/15

More shots Re-organized
The angles were rough

02/13/15
More rendering re-shooting and pasting together

Tuba-Goose

My objective with the Tuba-Goose Stories

I want the audience to learn a new appreciation for the absurd and find virtue in people who frustrate them.

Method

I am trying manipulate the audience into being annoyed and cynical, in a parallel with the antagonists, and then shift their emotions to wistful after they understand Tuba-Goose’s struggle. When they revisit or recall the story, they become one of the protagonists, understanding and accepting the absurd.

Re-shoots Mixed So Far

Tuba-Goose Typing