Movement, Story & Structure: 2nd brainstorming session & ideas feedback

Yet another intensive day (thinking hurts)! We had to present our three most robust ideas for feedback and decide on one to develop further in preparation for the pitch next Tuesday.

My three presented ideas were... varying in overall quality, I suppose is the diplomatic way to put it, two centring around identity and the last related to phobias.

My first idea I was initially quite keen on, as previously described I wanted to animate to a recorded interview — similar Aardman's 'Creature Comforts' shorts:

It's a great example of how the best comedy or the best ideas simply come from everyday life and conversation — people say the strangest things and sometimes just shifting the context can make such comments hilarious, poignant or even just depressing. Very witty use of characters and subject displacement — something as simple as a piranha with a toothache works really well. I suppose this is something I'd been hoping I might be able to emulate as well — but in hindsight it's a very different subject and it probably wouldn't have lead to the desired result.

I was thinking of asking people to describe a type of person, group of people or subculture and have the character be built, come to life and change in accordance with the given description. I thought this could have been pretty interesting but it was problematic in that I would have been very limited to what information I could get from interviews. The idea would depend almost entirely from what was given to me — it would have been difficult to plan and schedule for it, and even (as Andy suggested) trying to gently engineer the interviews to give the desired results would have been tricky.

The second idea was the one with the masks; Andy did note that it was the third mask idea he'd heard that day but wasn't terribly surprised as, with four fairly standard themes, common ideas were bound to occur. It is, after all, how you approach and present the idea that's most important. He liked my suggestion of a big bag of masks, being awkward to carry around, representing emotional baggage, and suggested that I condensed the idea down to a simple domestic situation with conflict caused by or involving this baggage, as opposed to having a big long tale of a man getting up, going to work and encountering lots of people. He mentioned I should look at the way Darren Walsh used masks in his graduate film 'Oozat' — so I'll be having a poke around for that.

The third idea was quite similar to the first in terms of execution. Rather than interviewing, I was thinking of simply having some sort of recorded voiceover giving a (fictitious) account of something that had happened to them — a typically 'adult' worry such as debt, redundancy, or some other difficulty but animating that as a child might understand it. I was intending to represent the idea that as we grow older, fears and phobias are commonly seen as something 'childish' or as a sign of weakness — by illustrating them from the innocent perspective of a child I'd hoped to suggest that we are all reduced to a childlike state in the face of fear or danger. The biggest problem with this though is that I wouldn't be writing something that I knew — having never experienced something like severe debt (for example) I'd probably end up giving a very shallow portrayal. I did have some things in my head that I thought could have worked fairly nicely — representing 'debt' (or whatever) as a big, scribbled monster destroying a house as the voiceover described how their family and home was lost — but, ultimately, I do completely agree and it wasn't an idea I felt was really 'working' for me.

I think I'll be sticking with my second idea. The tricky part is going to be coming up with a relatively simple set up and conflict with enough legs to work with. I've been toying around with different settings — an argument over breakfast, washing the dishes, a pub — but nothing's really been sparking my imagination so far. Hopefully a quick break will help!