After an interesting session recapping the structure of fairy-tales according to Propp, my group was given ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to adapt to a 60 second motion graphic. Here’s my breakdown of the story.
Beat 1: Beauty and her family loose their fortune and are forced into an agricultural lifestyle.
Beat 2: After bunking in the Beast’s castle without gratitude, Beauty’s father is given an ultimatum by the Beast.
Beat 3: Beauty forfeits herself to spare her father’s life and goes to live in the castle.
Beat 4: Beauty refuses to marry the beast and asks to return to her father for only a week.
Beat 5: She stays longer than a week.
Beat 6: She returns after ten days and saves the Beast from death and he transforms into a handsome Prince.
Unfortunately for our group, there’s quite a lot of context to this story for a 60 second film so we’re probably gonna have to gut the original story limb from limb to get this to work for our needs.
My attempt to condense the story into a 60 second script proved rather hopeless – exposition takes up 40 seconds. What we need to do is sit down and have a think about what we want to change and what kind of direction we want to take the story in before we re-write it for our own purpose.
Finley Geen 