Wednesday 4 March 2009

I feal all piraty. Arghhhh!

So here we are again, proving that I have not learnt my lesson and am a glutton for punishment I am about to embark upon a voyage into the sea of stop-motion aboard the good ship ignorance. Will it be a voyage of no return? Only time shall tell. And the scurvy sea dog’s accompanying me: peg leg Ben and rum-swilling Rosie.

O.K. I’m running out of sea-faring words now so I will stop and behave myself. In all seriousness I think that we can actually do something quite interesting with the old robot script, despite the disappointing sound. At the moment I think we are going for a spoof buddy cop series about two officers who are rather past their prime and of course the big joke is that actually, everybody is a robot.

I have been looking at quite a lot of Quay brothers’ stuff which has resulted in some rather trippy ideas: we are thinking of possibly nicking the idea of the tricycle ridden by Gilgamesh in This Unnameable Little Broom, (which I can’t actually find on Youtube, so apologies) and plonking the chief character in a similar contraption, surrounded by monitors, blinky lights and wot-not. I have also been toying with the idea of not giving any of the characters mouths or legs, conveniently eliminating the need for lip-sync or walk-cycles. I do have sketches of all of this but I am a bit pressed for time so I will try and scan them in later.

In terms of the set and props I have been thinking of quite a disappointing and satirical future where the human race has made little progress beyond making everything nice and shiny. I think the sets have the most scope for bringing humor into the script so hopefully we can work in quite a lot of visual gags. I have been looking at the work of Ken Adam, who among many other films designed the sets for most of the James Bond films and Dr. Strangelove, as his sets look quite futuristic but also have that 60’s/70’s vibe about them and I think that this could be an interesting look for the L.A. of the future.

1 comment:

Rosie said...

I feel I should point out that I am a drinker of whiskey not rum.

Apart from that, I am very pleased that you are excited about the project. You know we are only doing it in stop motion to make you happy, right?