@Alan - Proposed new story- Minor
For the new story I was thinking of doing it on the way that academics gate keep their work with their language and that if someone new came to it, they would be completely baffled, as I have been when learning Post Modernism with Phil last year. Because of this, I'd like to make the animation more adult but keep the same animation style of a kids show, like Mary and Max.
In terms of a story I was thinking Simon(the student) decides to get ahead on his work by reading the more advanced books in the library. After bringing them to life with a potion, he is unable to understand what they are going on about because of the language they use, and because they argue or disagree with each other and sort of gang up on him for not knowing their world. Simon ends up being confused, almost overwhelmed because he is not ready for the content contained. Mary (the teacher), knows he isn't ready and already put out the books he would need, ones that he can understand, as because she is an experienced teacher she knows what he is currently capable of.
I see the books as a sort of gentleman's club, keeping out those who aren't themselves, those being the highly educated, upper class sorts, and mostly older men. This has the added effect of being easy to characterise, I'm thinking big facial hair and glasses/monocles, which will be made out of the pages of the books folded to look like them. After a quick chat with Tom, we came up with the idea of a book that had some of the pages cut out to hide a hip flask of alcohol, which be a kind of background gag, perhaps more of this kind of idea could be worked in, such as a thesaurus being brought to life a dinosaur because it's name sounds like the name of one.
Outline of Story:
- Mary finishing a lesson with Simon, he's looking out a window and not paying attention
- Mary gets his attention, Simon acts like he was listening the entire time
- She tells him to get on with some work, telling him to recap what he learned during the lesson, while she runs some errands in town
- Simon plays it cool until Mary leaves
- Not able to see the notes and books left by Mary to help him before she left, heads into the library to find something to help him recap the lesson
- He finds a old school bag belonging to one of Mary's old students Merlin, it has a potion that brings books to life, it's labelled "Study Aid"
- Simon looks around for a book on what Mary was teaching, unfortunately he trips and the potion brings a whole bookshelf of books to life
- The books come down to talk to Simon, he asks them to teach him the thing that Mary was teaching him earlier
- The books start to help Simon, he starts to writing everything down, until they start to use more complex language
- Simon asks them to explain the language they're using, they all laugh at him and carry on
- The books start going off track, talking about more advanced things and starting to argue with each other
- Because of this, Simon starts to panic, frantically trying to write everything down, crossing things out and tearing out pages of his notebook.
- While this is happening, Mary is shopping in the town peacefully
- Simon is still trying to scribble down all the book's information, eventually running out of pages
- Mary arrives back, Simon hears this and runs out of the library with the books following him.
- Mary, seeing and hearing the books, quickly zaps them with her magic, turning them back into normal books
- Simon is completely burnt out from the experience
- Mary comments that she knows Simon found Merlin's old experiment
- She tells him that he isn't ready for those kind of books just yet, and that all the information he needed was already put out for him, she already knew he wasn't paying attention
- She calms him down and sets him up to do his work properly, pulling a new notebook from her bag for him
- Simon starts to do the work again, Mary sees that he is confused and uses her magic to flip the page to one that would help him
Hi Ollie - Okay, this sounds fun. What you should do next is smooth out/simplify/eradicate anything which is too complex to help the audience access the setup quicker and allow you to have fun with their expectations. It will mean less 'time wasting' uneccessary work too. One way to think of that process is to look at the 'strands' of your short (themes/characters) and see if they exist for the audience from beginning to end. If they just 'appear' then you have done something wrong (think the opening of Back to the Future). For example, 'Merlin's bag'. That seems a bit arbritary, however, if it was a 'forbidden' bookcase (containing all the answers in Simon's mind) that was set up early in the short, then that makes sense why Simon would be tempted - Its like the teachers book with all the answers. In terms of Simon himself, is he 'Harry, Ron, or Hermione'? in terms of personality - a good boy, naughty, or a swot. Knowing that changes the 'learning experience' for the character. A good boy would need to be forced to cheat by external forces and therefore would be forgiven by the teacher. A naughty boy would cheat and then end up with twice as much punishment. A swot would take the risk for the knowledge and therefore would end up with 'poetic' knowledge instead - eg book knowledge isn't everything. At the moment I am not 100% sure what your character is learning based upon his personality. Again, knowing this will 'smooth out' the animation and give you a structure to work around. As I said, all of that needs setting up at the beginning. Another way to think of it is to think 'Sherlock Holmes solving a crime' - Start with the 'crime' (The end/Simon's chaos) and then look at establishing the moments before the crime is committed - The time, place, opportunity, and motive etc. Hope that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense to me. I'll get some stuff done for Friday
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