Saturday, October 25, 2014

Minor Project - Story Restructuring

In between feedback at the pitch and after conversation about moving forward, I've decided to restructure the story, the premise is the same, but after a conversation with Phil I feel it makes sense to change the mcguffin.

How this affects the story
The new mcguffin is a TV remote for a big screen on a building outside the park, I felt this made more sense because these squirrel live on the outskirts of a city, they're domesticated and having a big screen on a building is very common now, the fact that two squirrels control the display was funny to me.
[very very rough draft] Drawing out each frame quickly to get shot ideas down
I am just being transparent with my process, here I've just drawn out really roughly what I want each shot to look like before I go back in detail. this took about five minutes to do, but I felt I needed to post it in case anyone had any suggestion on shots I kept a few frames from the previous storyboard but the majority of the frames are new.

I broke down my story into acts so I could see it working structurally before I drew it on paper. One of my main criticisms were that it escalated too quickly, it hits 11 as soon as the animation starts and there's no where to go from there, in this new version of the story I wanted to focus on the dynamics between the two characters, I spend more time with the characters and let the slapstick take a back seat, it's still very much a slapstick short but I felt that element would come naturally if I had the characters at the forefront every time. B is strong but unlike my previous storyboard/animatic he wouldn't go out of his way to beat up S, he does things like a baby and most of the animation I have B following S's lead.

Structure
Introduction - Squirrels fight for TV Remote
Complication - It Falls into the grip of a sleeping fat boy
Middle - They attempt to release the remote from the guys hand
Climax - Using the burger they trick the human into dropping the remote
Denouement - They celebrate as they've freed the remote
Coda - They realise only one person can get the remote so they fight. it falls into a lake. A van dumps acid on it, and we cut back to the squirels watching the shopping channel after the credit scene.

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