Week 1 - Ideas

As I have mentioned on the previous posts I was always interested with the serious emotional story line. I always enjoy listening or watching people's documentaries (non-fictional stories) since I find them interesting more than anything else. I do enjoy making up stories but I like making stories based on the true stories, for example, using my own or my families experience and change into animation style by simplifying the story line or exaggerating the certain parts.

Recently I have traveled back into my home country Japan and re-united with my families. As I was having a nice conversation with my Grandmother I suddenly asked her this, Can I hear your story? Since it was a sudden question so my Grandmother was rather confused, but after the few seconds of awkward silence, she was happily talked about her life.
I would classify my Grandmother as a strong, happy and optimistic person. Since I was young I have never seen her acting pessimistic, she was always full of happiness. Even after my Grandfather (my Grandmother's husband) 's death she did not lose her happy mind (well, at least at the front of people). I was always curious how she can be such a happy person, has she always been so happy, is there any reason to keep her so positive minded. 
The stuff I heard from her was not something that I would have imagined, in fact, I was actually surprised how she can be so happy after all the things happened on her in her early life.

Firstly she has told me that she was adopted when she was 9 years old by her aunt. She did not tell me how hard or difficult it was, but I would believe it was one of the most hardest thing to do. I would say 9 years old is probably old enough to understand the situation, but maybe too young to be separated by their parents.
Then she went through WW2 and experienced the hard time with poverty, but after the war she met a man who will become a future husband (my Grandfather).
They fell in love and got married, everything looking good, my Grandmother then became pregnant.
When she gave birth to her first child everyone was happy and everyone wished her and her daughter a happy life. But all suddenly the child died from the illness. She was only a couple months old.
She then got pregnant again for her second child, keeping the hopes, but ended up losing her second child, a baby boy.
I could never imagine from her that she went through hard time losing her child, not just once, twice. What surprised me was that she still stayed strong and tried again, and gave birth to 3 more child who is my Aunties and my mother. She has told me that the reason she can stay positive is that even she has lost her first 2 babies she still managed to raise 3 more child and they all grew up healthy and happy.
"Better be happy than sad" is her ways to keep happy and strong. After hearing her stories I was so inspired with her sad, but strong stories and wanted to use this as an idea of my story boarding.

I have done a bit of sketching of this storyboard.