Easter Break & Wk 4: Update

Whoa Nelly...have we gotten the creative bug or what! I think it is fair to say we were all frustrated and anxious of the fact that we had not started this film...aghh...maybe cause...WE HAD NO CONCEPT!!! Anything we had was sort of shot down by the powers to be...a few more meetings and still no resolution...But then...

Easter Break get together:-

This meeting seen us get together and fully nut out 2 stories...

1. Grand Canon Pa


2. Love Letters

By the end of this meeting we had pretty vague ideas about Love Letters. Caryn's concern was that it would be too lovey dovey and people would shy away from it.

Grand Canon Par seemed to have more obvious story line, character animation that could be evenly split up between the group and an evident production process, which Caryn was attracted to. Damien and I though felt it was just another narrative with a twist, too many cleche's were coming forward and it didn't have that shamanistic element to it that we were both trying to achieve. We both knew we would rather work on Love Letters....but didn't know how or why.

So we decided to all go way to write a treatment on each concept. A few days later, Caryn emailed us with the concept that instead of the girl resolving a relationship with another person, what if it was her rediscovering herself and she was looking in a mirror...this would be a valid reason as to why she was in a surreal environment.

An other, non story related issue arose:- Who's in the group? This was becoming a stress pot for some of us in the group - who we would be willing to work with and who we couldnt/wouldn't work with.

Week 4:-

On the Monday back...a few more ideas were thrown around. Damien had found an image of this girl on a balcony and felt this could be a good starting point for our love letter story. By the time we were attending Animation Business and Policy on Wednesday, it seemed fairly obvious that the story that was stuck in all our minds now was the Love letters one...but by now Damien has renamed it Down the line.

Side note - Im still amazed at how many creative ideas i was able to pull out during such an analytical subject...

I suggested:-

• use colour to differentiate the characters mood throughout the story...i.e. start in complete black and white...with each step she takes in rediscovering herself, a little more colour is introduced to the scene.

• in the first scenes dont have many objects in the scene - just her, a loved object ie plant, the significant object, the balcony rail and clothes line. This is to suggest she feels she has almost nothing in her life or that she believes at this point she is completly alone.

• As the movie progresses, have things slowly reintroduced to teh scene...i.e. cityscape to realise she isn't alone, unit objects - bed. Damien suggested, we could reintroduce the paper/letter subltly with this where she is concious of the rediscovery so she draws what she wants on the paper - love this idea.

• when character is near object of that significant other, the only thing colourful in that scene was her red beating heart...later Caryn suggested, why don't we make it blue to really drive home that sense of depression...and it too could morph colour by the end to Red to suggest she has found passion in life again - great idea aswell.

• Clothes line goes to infinity and then in the end she grabs it and reels it in until 2 building collide - damiens idea...a bit corny, but has great imagery associated with it so would probably really work.

In this session of meeting it was also ascertained who was in the group:-

Groupies are Caryn "cool nut" Girardi, Damien "Harvey" Wong and myself.

We also started designing our main character and nutting out what kind of environment would she be in.

Environment:- We like the idea of a European, bohemian studio apartment. The studio idea, also strengthens the impression that she is trapped or imprisoned somewhere, loneliness. She would be in a well built up sort of city area, cause she's a 20 something and again, the city is a stereotype for lonliness etc.

Character:- Female as they tend to be more in touch with emotion. And can come up with a more stylised apartment for a girlrather than a guy.

I was suggesting we try and push her stylistically as Craig is in my head saying " Realism can't be done..." And we all know what he means. So I found this post card and thought we could use this as inspiration...

You can see a whole bunch more of these girls at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5082288

Group mission statement - something like Pixar.

Group Aim - to complete a final film that is very original, stands out from the rest but ultimately really means something to us all and hopefully to our audience.

Conclusion: So from here we are writing another treatment...well as far as I know, Im the only one writing a treatment, Damien is designing characters, and Caryn is researching.