New story line

Once again I’m afraid that the update on the dissertation progress and the character development that I did over the summer will have to be put on hold as surprise, surprise, I have changed the storyline for the final project again. All shall be explained shortly but first I would like to announce the arrival of my brand spanking new blog (one clearly wasn’t enough) “Photography Fodder” – it sounds better if you say it in a Cornish accent, dedicated to all things of a camera and light based nature. As of yet there is nothing on it but over the coming weeks I plan to post some stuff on it for your viewing pleasure.

So, the story line I am running with for this week is that the piper now survives and bludgeons the poor little creatures to death with a book; all would have been explained in my lovely animatic, but blogger wont let me load it. So I will have to describe it to you: (if anyone really wants to see it let me know) it contains elements from the original storyboard as well as new stuff which aims to build up the characters a bit.
I have tried to keep the different types of shots to a minimum, I think I will be able to get away with three or four, to speed up filming as much as possible, camera movement has also been limited; now there are only two shots requiring it, the truck-in on the poster shouldn’t be too much of a problem but the pan shot of the creatures may be a bit tricky, so I will have to do some tests to see if it will work.
I am hoping that this is pretty much the finished article in terms of the story, as this is the third version, obviously it still needs a bit of tarting-up to make it look pretty though. The main problem encountered with the story has been establishing the character’s roles and giving the audience something to empathies with. I have tried to solve this by showing the poster at the beginning, which will be advertising for someone to get rid of the creatures or something along those lines – the piper now has a purpose. The piper now has a proper sinister walk and nasty hand-rub thing going on, basically stolen off the child-catcher in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang – we now know the piper is bad and wrong (this also sets up a nice twist when things go wrong for her). The piper is constantly referring to a manual – we know she isn’t very good at her job.
As you have hopefully noticed from the animatic everyone now has eyes, so they can see, it also makes the creatures a bit more cute and lovable. Which character the audience empathies with is still a problem, mainly because I am still not that sure which character I want them to like. I have also started to look at things like The Trapdoor for inspiration to inject the animation and character design with a bit more humor. This week I hope to go away and do a bit more concept art of the characters to give them that trap-dooresque kinda look because the current look of the characters isn’t really working.