And so it came to pass that 13 to 19 March 2016. I’m back into story and development again.
Back
in December, the story hinged on a rogue sombrero which shakes Pointy
around and smashes him into the ground because it doesn’t understand his
accent – a common problem that Australians face with voice activated
devices.
The
sombrero has stuck around but gag has evolved. The sombrero has gone
from hovering (and violently malfunctioning) to making the wearer dance
involuntarily (as a prank) to playing music by remote control (as an
annoyance) to having a novelty walkie talkie receiver inside it (as an
even greater annoyance).
To stop myself from straying too far
again into development limbo (again), I wrote some guidelines on what
drives the characters, what they can and can’t do, etc. Things like:
- Pointy
can’t stay out in the sun. It makes him floppy and sad. But there is no
shade except a) Gronky’s shadow, b) whatever shade Pointy gets from the
things Gronky digs up. Hence, Pointy needs Gronky despite loathing him. - Gronky
never gets angry at Pointy. Gronky is fond of Pointy and wants to help
him. Gronky is also utterly incapable of assisting Pointy no matter what
he tries. - Pointy’s undoing is inevitably a result of his own
hubris, impatience, anger, failings of character, etc. Gronky may load
the metaphorical pistol but it’s Pointy that ultimately fires it. - Pointy can never get away from Gronky (or the game/joke is over).
So the stage is set for a sort of purgatorial comedy – not unlike the Coyote and Road Runner cartoons which had a similar set of rules.
Over
the course of the week I bridged my intro/premise (sun too bright, hat
fixes sun but hat annoying) and resolution (Pointy loses his cool and
suffers) with a good escalation. I tightened the story up, printed out a
synopsis and scribbled thumbnails all over it, did some audio tests,
cobbled together old bits of layout with newer tweaked ones, created a
new prop, did more thumbnailing to flesh things out.. generally getting
my ducks in a row for Easter when I’ll have a few days straight to go
hammer and tongs at layout.
Also this week, I tried out Jacques Lucke’s Animation Nodes plugin for Blender. It’s been getting a lot of attention and signal
boost lately – turns out that it’s useful, powerful and lots of fun.
Check out a demoreel here. or have a look at Jacques’s own tutorials here.
Also this week I saw Zootopia and started inventing an experimental artificial language which uses only verbs, anaphora and particles. As you do.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
