What?! Pointy is smiling? Gronky is visibly confused and so would anyone be, but that’s the kind of week I’ve had this last 1 to 7 December. Lots of changes.

The Quiet One resurfaced again briefly on Tuesday, but up until this weekend I was boarding new shots, making small changes to dialogue and recording scratch, generally poking at the animatic with increasingly diminished enthusiasm until it was ready to show to people again.

Then came Saturday afternoon.

That’s when I showed what I’d done to a friend who actually works in the movie industry. We talked it over. It was clearer but still… something wasn’t right. Why is this crazy pointy guy haranguing someone for using up too much sunlight in a desert? The reason I had then was that Pointy was a public-minded individual who was hassling Gronky on account of the newspapers making up a story about a sunlight shortage to scare people into buying more newspapers. It took a lot of setting up.

First we thought that gag should be presented upfront for clarity’s sake since it’s not strong or central enough to be a punchline. Then we talked some more.

We decided that it would be far more logical in a desert if shadows held value instead of being considered a waste of perfectly good sunlight. That made much more intuitive sense than some intellectual exercise in irony where desert sunlight is considered rare enough to hassle people about.

This kind of insight is why I’m not planning to make a movie locked alone in a shack away from the rest of the world. It’s my first try making an animated short film but in retrospect that change is so obvious.. anyway.

That one tweak swept through the story like the mum from Requiem for a Dream, cleaning a lot of stuff up. The story became much simpler to tell and got to the point much quicker than before. The gags got more dense. Pointy has gone from a malcontent bully to a manipulative slimeball with a short fuse. Gronky is more impish and thicker. Everything’s gelling far better than it did 48 hours ago.

Even better, only about 20% of the shots needed reboarding. (All the temp dialogue was rewritten and rerecorded though.) About 20 seconds of shots have been outright replaced. The tag ending’s changed too. It’s longer but funnier.

I’ve got another three shots left to storyboard before I can watch the animatic from start to finish again uninterrupted, so I’d better get back to it if I want to watch it tonight.