Story Time

I've spent the past week working on story for the project I've been talking about. The idea was to have 5 stories about how bad things happen when things don't fit. Originally the idea was to have these bad things cause a chain reaction which escalates into an epic disaster but with the time constraint and the style choice it didn't seem like it was going to work.

The new approach is to make 5 individual stories which are more intimate, about one or two average joes coming across problems with things fitting. I've spent a lot of time working out the pacing of these stories because I'm aiming for it to be very consistent from story to story.

I came up with a structure that all 5 shorts what have to fit in to:

1. Establish Character
2. Set Up Situation
3. Fitting Problem
4. Attempts to Overcome
5. Something Goes Wrong
6. Final Punchline

I decided the first shot for all the shorts would be about 3 seconds of the character walking in their environment. Their walk, design and environment should establish the character and help set up the situation he/she's about to get themselves in.

The final scene would also have to be consistent too so I decided they would all end with a cut to the company logo (as the client requested) and sound effects to deliver that last punchline.

From there I took some of my story ideas and fit them into the structure I'd come up with...

Postman:
1. Postman in uniform with bag walking down a rural street
2. Postman arrives at house looking nervous, looks inside to check on the dog house in the garden. He then gets out the parcel he has to deliver and sneaks across the garden to the door.
3. Postman finds out he can't fit the parcel through the letterbox
4. Trying to stay quiet he attempts to push the parcel through the letterbox
5. With his last hard push he manages to get the parcel through but his arms go through the letterbox too and get stuck. He hears a growl and turns towards the dog house
6. Bite noise and screams

I did the same with a story about a pair of guys moving in a sofa and a drunk guy who tries to fit his car in a parking space which is too small.

Over the last couple of days I've whipped up some quick storyboards and made them into animatics.

Postman

Sofa

Drunk

I had the idea of making the camera angles kind of CCTV/peeping tom angles to add to the feeling of intimacy with the characters. Like we're watching this story play out from the sidelines. I'm not sure how strongly that will come across but another advantage of this idea is that only having 3 static cameras works well with the style I'm going for. Moving cameras and too many camera changes could disorient with the static textures layed under the objects.

There should be updates soon with the character designs I promised to show and some modelling progress. It's going to be a very busy week, same as every week lately...

Cheers