I was always going to end it with Lucy going round to her fathers house after not having spoken to him for a great deal of time, maybe even years, simply to drop off some of his old belongings. There she'd find him throwing out his old booze and he's destroyed his firearms. He spots her stood in his kitchen and is completely taken aback by her presence, as is Lucy by his. Then the animation ends with a long shot. This long shot was absolutely essential to the narrative and it's with great regret I have not completed it for submission, I will however complete it for End of Year Show.
The reason why I think the shot is so successful is because throughout the animation we hardly ever see the main two characters on screen together. Lucy is in every shot so whenever we do see Cop, he's never more than ten feet away from her, however I rarely wanted to put them in the same frame because I feel like this separation is representing of Lucy seeing Cop through her eyes and her perspective. When we see him and her together on screen it's like she's lost control and we can view him as separate, it's now up to us to judge how we see this man.
I also wanted to exaggerate how much distance they have between each other by exaggerating the size of the kitchen so they appear smaller on screen than they ever have. Lucy is no longer presented in a mid shot, she has lost control and is essentially out of her depth.
The staging of this shot was heavily inspired by The Sopranos. Frequently I've noticed episodes will end with a long shot to accomplish the same goals I am trying to.
In the episode Join the Club, Tony Soprano finds himself more isolated more isolated than he's ever been in his life. In the final scene, the camera spends most it's time fixed on a close up of his face, we as the viewer can study his emotions and reactions until the final shot. In the final shot he looks comparatively small in frame in a room that's dimly lit with a chair in the corner that's noticeably empty and a dark sky outside. It's in these moments that we truly get a sense of how alone the character really is.
I wanted to highlight that sense of loneliness and feeling small by staging my characters in away that they look so small in their surroundings and are also so far away from each other that they no longer look like a father and daughter but instead look like two complete strangers that just happen to have made eye contact in the same building.
But it's not just The Sopranos ending long shots that inspired me with the final scene but also the content of how they would frequently end episodes. An episode would never end with a 'so did we all learn something?' style ending, things would not always get resolved and I think that's far truer to real life. Yes, you cannot do that in everything and it is often better to wrap things up. However with this animation I did not want it to be too narrative based and I definitely did not want to just 'wrap things up' when it does end.
An example of an episode that served as a very good example of this and heavily inspired me was the episode Where's Johnny? I don't remember exactly what happens in this episode, but I will always remember the ending, it is incredibly impacting, hugely down to the fact it is so open-ended.
The final scene of this episode features Tony Soprano and Junior Soprano who love each other dearly yet have an ever increasingly fractured relationship.
The scene starts with a long shot of Junior looking isolated and small on screen. Tony enters basically out of the shadows, we can hardly see him from Junior's perspective symbolising that to him, Tony is just a stranger.
While Junior stays at the same size from Tony's perspective, Tony actually gets smaller looking ever increasingly like a stranger.
Tony places himself on the sofa next to Junior and while out of focus, they are on screen together symbolising that they maybe getting closer.
This only lasts a couple of seconds before the pair begin to argue. They then stop being shown on screen together and become increasingly isolated.
The last piece of dialogue is from Tony who asks in a defeated manner 'Don't you love me?'. Junior does not reply to this and the two sit in silence before silently tearing up before the screen cuts to credits. There is no resolve in this. Neither apologises and there are no hugs. We can imagine that there are plenty of things these two want to say to each other, but they don't because sometimes we can't. The episode ends and we have no idea what follows, it's up to us to make up our minds which leaves us emotionally hanging and the episode stays with us in a way I don't think it would have if things had been neatly resolved.
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