It’s been 9 to 15 October 2016 and I’ve got another 9 days until I leave for the Blender Conference. Despite losing half the week to gastroenteritis and a surprise migraine, I still managed to get another ten shots laid out. There’s one more sequence left to do with seven unfinished shots in it.
One particular shot is worrying me because it’s long, complicated, specific, action heavy and a bit story critical. It follows Pointy’s futile attempts to get a rock out of the ground. Its shot name is 03_A6_A.
In the previous shots, Pointy is a little annoyed and trying to switch off the hat so he doesn’t have to listen to Gronky having fun. In the shot after it, Pointy takes drastic measures to switch off the hat. I want to bridge those two parts of the story believably with Pointy losing his composure. The opening scene of the film shows that Pointy gets hurt because he doesn’t think things through, so if I tell the story right the audience has a sense of what’s coming and looks forward to it.
03_A6_A’s structure will be a quickfire montage of Pointy trying to get a stone out of the ground and hurting himself repeatedly. I draw my ideas as rough cartoons and this was idea #1:
There’s many ways that Pointy might try to get a stone out of the ground without success and they’re a good indicator of his current state of mind. If he’s calm, he might try to pull it out with his hands, lose his grip and punch himself. If he’s less calm, he might try kicking it out, then he hurts his foot and gets angry and tries something even more rash.
The sensible stuff goes at the beginning of the shot when he’s relatively calm and the sillier/weirder ideas happen towards the end. And as he goes through this he’s being driven nuts by the weird Gronky noises coming out of the hat. There’s a lot going on. 🙂
So once I’ve got enough good ideas for how Pointy can humiliate himself, I’ll put them in order and go through the usual pipeline – storyboards to refine the rough sketches, a “pitchamatic” to make sure the action is funny and flows well, a timed “flatmatic” (storyboards + soundtrack) with scratch dialogue to tune the pacing and finally a rough 3D version to flesh out the action. Hopefully by the end of that process I have a funny shot that advances the story and entertains the audience.
To stop myself stressing out about it too much, I’m telling myself this: even if it falls a bit flat, it’s just one shot and there’s plenty of other laughs later on. 🙂
Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you again next week! 🙂
