That was 19 to 25 February 2017. This week I devised a couple of character and plot notes for the introduction.
With Gronky, I want to emphasise a giddy enthusiasm and affinity for technology. He also has a giddy enthusiasm for burying things, which is his “job” in the desert.
For Pointy, I came up with a backstory which shows his anti-technology character trait and explains what he’s doing in the desert. After a big night out, he catches a self-driving taxi but impatiently gives his home address as “Western Australia” before blacking out having a nice sleep. The taxi dutifully drops him off roughly where the words “Western Australia” appear on a world map.
These two things give the characters a sharp point of difference that plays out in the story. I’ve been down the “recounted backstory” path before though and I’ve found it tricky to do well, plotwise. And so it goes into the ideas bank, along with my other ideas. If I still like it next week, I’ll take that as a good sign. 🙂
That’s about all I got done, movie-wise. I’ve just been too busy this week enduring high stress and late finishes at the day job, swotting up on cognitive behavioural therapy and sensory processing sensitivity, cutting my caffeine intake in half and getting withdrawal symptoms, tapering off diazepam, and training myself to follow a screen-free pre-sleep routine.
Somehow with all this going on I still have some weird primal need for creative expression. So instead of animation, I’ve started making music again, improvising jams with old-school electronic instruments and dreaming up some new sonic toys to play with. The workflow is pretty loose and unstructured and fun, and I managed to make at least one piece I really like. But that’s a whole different blog post. 🙂
