16 to 22 August 2015 calling..

It’s been not the best week for making cartoons. I’ve drawn scene 6 and an incomplete version of scene 7. Monday to Friday was almost a complete write-off from doing training for work. I was up early and had no energy left for making cartoons in the evening – not that it mattered because I had to be in bed early too. Living off-chronotype sucks.

As promised last week, some words on Scene 6. Codename: The Dance. Here’s an example of how a key sequence can evolve over the course of developing the story.

“The Dance” first showed up back in November last year: Pointy is steadfastly refusing to get out of Gronky’s shadow, so Gronky playfully leads Pointy back and forth across the screen while prancing around like a buffoon. In a dialogue-heavy short, it is the big physical comedy bit and everything until then builds up to it.

In animatic form it has reduced multiple people to tears of laughter.

As the story changed around it, it made less sense to keep it as it was. Keeping it where it was took more and more contriving. People began to ask questions about what it was doing there. It stuck out to them.

It didn’t stick out to me because I wrote it.

Stories get changed in chunks and stop fitting together (thematically, tonally, pacing-wise, etc), so once in a while everything has to be made to work as a whole again. If a particular bit of the story is really awesome, I maybe don’t care as much as I should about making it work as part of the entire story. I might re-tool it a little bit but I’m often reluctant to really get in there and fix it – where "fixing” sometimes means “getting rid of” – because I’m afraid of screwing it up.

What it comes down to is that it’s a damn funny scene and part of me wants people to see it even if it means sabotaging the rest of the film. Sometimes it’s hard to tell genuinely valid intuitions from reluctance powered by self-doubt. So it goes.

Over time it became clearer and truer to me that it was not the right scene, even if it was a good scene.

When the scene was first devised, Gronky was much more playful. In that context, The Dance worked. To start with, Pointy was in Gronky’s shadow to try to shame him. Later in the “dodgy entrepreneur Pointy” version, Pointy was staying in Gronky’s shadow because he’d tricked Gronky into starting a mobile shade service and he didn’t want let his new cash cow out of his sight. (There’s a full animatic for this version. You may even get to see it one day…)

In the March 2015 rewrite, Gronky’s objective changed a little bit. Instead of getting Pointy out of his shadow, he wants to distract Pointy with the dance. To say any more would only reveal how crappy the character work in that rewrite was. Too crappy. Wasn’t on my radar. The desperate urge to feel like I was making progress overwhelmed my better judgement and long story short I made an eight minute 3D animatic without writing the story properly first.

In the July 2015 rewrite which focussed more on character and pacing, Gronky is no longer playful nor dumb. Pointy is no longer an angry shadow-hating citizen or a scheming entrepreneur. The character motivations and character dynamics leading up to that point have changed entirely. Of course the scene had to change.

All along I’m asking myself: “What can I keep from the original scene that will still work in this new version?”

I’m not sure if this new Scene 6 will be as funny as the old version. I haven’t seen it in action yet. It feels less like an isolated show-piece and more like part of a story. For the sake of story-craft, I’m happy with that. I just hope after all this it’s still going to be able to reduce people to tears of laughter like the old version could.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you again next week. 🙂