Rewriting the script, what to do afterwards

Okay so the first script I drafted up went with the basic idea of a beardy guy telling his epic tales and being told the painful truth by some smarmy git sitting near him. The script went as follows.

INTRO SEGMENT
EXT. Rusty Sea Shanty
It is a stormy night filled with thundering clouds and fierce waves. We zoom up on an old fashioned rusty sea shanty.
INT. Sea Shanty
Warrior is sitting over a lantern lit wooden table, surrounded by a few nervous sailor types. With a beer clenched in his fist, he regails his tales, unnerving those that hear it.
WARRIOR: Oh aye, I’ve been through various treacherous trials on a quest frought with danger.

SEGMENT ONE: Penguins
EXT. Ice filled mountains
WARRIOR (v/o): I fought an army of Cyber Penguins!
The Warrior can be seen standing at a top of a snow filled landscape, looking down upon waves of penguins equipped with cybernetic armour and laser guided machine guns. Brandishing his sword, he screams and charges into the crowd, lasers shooting out everywhere and several penguins being flown across the air as he makes his way through.

SEGMENT TWO: Manegg
INT. Laboratory of Blatant Evil Doings
WARRIOR (v/o): ... battled wits with the insane Professor Manegg!
We see the Warrior approaching Manegg, who turns around to see the Warrior in an ‘I’ve been expecting you look’. We zoom out to see a giant Egg Mech preparing a Gatling Gun to fire at the enemy. The Warrior brings out a convenient ‘Box of Hedgehogs’. Whilst Manegg laughs maniacally, Warrior throws one of the hedgehogs at the mech, causing it to explode a second later, engulfing Manegg in the blast.

SEGMENT THREE: Octopus
EXT. Ocean
WARRIOR (v/o): ... tangled with a Radioactive Ninja Octopus!
Warrior stands on a rock in the middle of the ocean, rain pouring on his face. As thunder roars, tentacles rise up and a shadow looms over the Warrior. We zoom out to see the Radioactive Ninja Octopus, glowing with a green aura and brandishing a kunai in one tentacle and a shuriken in the other. Warrior leaps towards the octopus with a scream, ending in a flash of light.

SEGMENT FOUR: Fire Sumo
EXT. Unknown
WARRIOR (v/o): ...and found myself face to face with a Fire Sumo!
Warrior stands in the middle of an inferno, the centre of which a giant sumo wrestler ablaze with fire. As Warrior shields himself from the heat, the Sumo takes a big breath and blows a big blast of fire which engulfs the Warrior for a few seconds before he slices it in half with his sword.
OUTRO SEGMENT
INT. Shanty
WARRIOR: But it was worth it to get the ultimate reward...The Complete Scrubs Blu-Ray DVD Boxset!
Warrior says this cheerfully as he brings up the DVD boxset. Just then, a casually dressed smarmy git, who was on the table next to Warrior’s crew, butts in.
GIT: Oh yeah! I’ve got that boxset too! Except I just went onto HMV.com where I used their easy to navigate system to get the latest dvds, music and games delivered straight to my door!
As he says this, cut to a simple office where Smarmy Git is cheerfully browsing the HMV website on his laptop. View of laptop shows various different segments of the HMV website, ending with a ‘You’re product is on its way’ type screen.
Cut back to Shanty, where Warrior is frozen in a state of disbelief over what he just heard, with the Git just standing there with an oblivious look on his face.
EXT. Shanty
Warrior’s screams of despair can be heard from outside whilst Nipper can be seen sitting next to a discarded gramophone, slightly distracted by the noise.
CUT TO LOGO
HMV.com – Get Closer (without needing to go anywhere)

When I showed this to my tutor, he suggested that I alter it so that whilst the flashbacks are epic, the dialogue was just describing menial tasks (ie. dealing with traffic = cyber penguins). However, I just didn't see that working in the context of the whole tale telling thing. I then considered given Beardyman (let's call him that for now) a day job at the office, where he talks about the hassles of daily life (represented by the epic battles). However, in this contest, it'd be silly to think that he'd be working in an office complex and somehow not be near any multimedia stores.

So, foregoing the whole dialogue context thing, I thought up a new concept that manages to improve the message of the story. Basically, this involves giving ol' Beardyman a wife/girlfriend.

This new variation, to sum it up quickly, involves Wifey sighing about a film she wants that she can't easily get, due to living several hundred miles from the nearest shops. Beardyman offers to go on this quest to get said object for her beloved, and heads off on a journey frought with danger. Meanwhile, Wifey discovers an ad advertising HMV.com and goes about ordering the thing online. (I don't think the viewing public will question how a house in the middle of nowhere somehow has broadband toooo much...) The hero, clearly not enjoying his quest, arrives at the HMV to buy the DVD. By the time he returns with the gift for his wife, she is already happily watching it, having gotten it delivered straight to her door. Enter witty line involving going back to exchanging it, throw in manly weeping and you've got yourself an ad.

Inside a generally lower-middle class home, a generally semi-intelligent woman (something like that chick from Braveheart) is looking through a magazine of the latest filmy releases. She catches the eye of a particular new DVD release (example used: UP). (Dialogue optional)
WIFEY: *sigh* I would love to have this DVD.
Warrior, picking up on her wife’s sighs, boasts loudly, brandishing his sword and posing magnificently in some random light source.
WARRIOR: Fear not, my darling wife! I shall make my way to the nearest HMV and obtain this item for you!
Warrior rushes out the door of the house, which is situated in the middle of nowhere, as a map pans into view showing the long journey Warrior needs to take to reach the nearest HMV. (Hint: it is very long). The map comes up to a shore line.
Cut to Warrior manning a dinky little vessel through a stormy ocean, only to be abruptedly stopped by Radioactive Ninja Octopus, who brandishes a kunai knife and gives the hero the ol’ ‘Neo gesture’, citing the Warrior to pull out his sword and charge at him.
Cut back to the Wife who, still looking at the magazine and sighing, notices an advertisement at the bottom of the page for HMV.com, giving a decidedly ooh-ish response.
WIFE: Hmmm, HMV.com?
Cut back to Warrior, who is now in a snowy landscape charging full speed with a shield, screaming as rams into a crowd of several Cyber Penguins, who try to shoot at him with his lasers, only to be knocked into the air.
Meanwhile, Wife is sat at the computer, browsing through the website and using its navigation system to find the UP DVD, to which she gives a smile.
Cut back to the Warrior, looking a little ragged and dirty following his previous battles, and finding himself up against a Fire Sumo, standing in a sumo pose and breathing bursts of flames from his mouth. Warrior is not pleased.
WARRIOR: Oh you have GOT to be kiddi-
Before he can finish his sentence, Warrior is engulfed in a crapload of fire.
Cut back to the Wife who, after an obligatory close up shot of a keyboard press/mouse click, is presented with an ‘Your order is on its way’ message on screen. She gives a relieved smile and a small clasp of hands.
Cut to a typical HMV store, where one of the clerks has just cheerfully served a local customer. As the customer leaves, the clerk is a little disturbed to see a skulking, panting, drenched and all together disgruntled looking Warrior coming up to the counter with UP DVD in hand.
Cut to a while later back in the house, where the Warrior, looking somewhat crazed in an ‘I was almost killed but it was totally worth it’ way, bursts into the door brandishing a HMV bag in his finger.
WARRIOR: I’m back! And I’ve got the DVD you wanted!
His look suddenly turns aghast, as we zoom out to see Wife casually watching UP on the telly.
WIFE: Ooooh, sorry hon, I went and got it online whilst you were out. If you’ve got the receipt you’re free to go back and exchange it.
The Warrior, overwhelmed by the bombshell of the pointlessness of his epic journey, burst into loud manly tears.
We cut to outside the house, the crying still audible, where the HMV mascot, Nipper, is casually sitting outside his kennel, with the classic gramophone next to him. The logos fade in one by one.
hmv.com
get closer...
without going too far.

This new script gives the story a lot more substance. In the first variation, Beardyman was all mighty and powerful, but here I'm giving him limits to his strength, adhering to Ed Hook's rules about giving people obstacles that get in the way of their goals. He's not a guy who can slay a ninja octopus for the sake of it, he's a guy who has to slay an octopus to carry on his journey. He's not one bit happy, but he'll endure it for the sake of his love. It also gives the underlying purpose, promoting the HMV site, more exposure.

So yeah, now I'm reworking Beardyman to look a bit more human. For starters, this just means giving him a beer belly. One of the main problems I'm having drawing is his huge-arse muscly arms. I either have to tone them down, or look into ways I can animate them easier (and before you ask, no I blatantly can't reference myself for it).

The Wife, is another aspect I'm looking into, mainly in determining what kind of wife she should be. Given the general trend of adverts, I want to make her a rather pretty woman in mid to late twenties. One dilemma is deciding what she should wear. I'm currently torn between whether should be addressed more adhering to her husband, in some tattered dress of sorts (much like Braveheart's hot girlfriend), or if I should stick her in a nice jumper and make her a bit more modern, providing contrast to her husband and making his entrance more of a surprise.

Another dilemma is deciding the hairstyle, since when it comes to me, I always end up drawing the same few hairstyles pertaining to some of my existing characters, and I know if I do that I'll get the whole 'you're sticking to what you're comfortable with' garbage from my tutors.

So yeah, in order to get this done for the YCN deadline, I'm gonna have to pull all the stops next month.

As for what to do afterwards, it's generally been suggesting I should try and extend this idea into something more meatier for the final deadline (the assessment for uni). Since this new variation doesn't particularly seem like the kind of thing you could extend much, I figured trying an additional theme would be nice.

One thing I was looking into is the idea of promoting the one aspect of video games that never gets enough airtime: digital downloads. Services like Xbox Live, Playstation Network and WiiWare provide various original titles that can be downloaded for the fraction of the cost of a full retail game. These games include retro remakes such as Mega Man 9, Bionic Commando Rearmed and the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 4, original titles like Castle Crashers, Shadow Complex and Splosion Man, to the really experimental stuff like Flower, Braid and bitTrip that wouldn't stand a chance in the retail world. Right now, the only real games that have gotten any on-screen mention (at least in the UK) are the downloadable episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV (Lost and the Damned and Big Gay Tony, both later released in retail) and Bonzai Barber for Wiiware (in one of the their boring as heck 'celebrities play games with old ladies' ads. *groan*)



Since I'm very much an Xbox 360 man, I figured if I do go with this, I'd make something advertising the cool stuff you can find on Xbox Live Arcade. It'd adhere to the classic concept of young british male narrating the wonders of the service whilst going through the motions. In the example of this, it would involve me explaining the various types of games, acting them out as I'd go along. For example, I'd start off with a typical green screen of myself doing the intro, then enter into a 3D model of sorts (need to learn how to rig argh) for one game, then shift into flash animation to represent one of The Behemoth's stylish games, such as Castle Crashers, then go into pixel art (which can be done in Flash using an extension) to represent the 8-bit Mega Man titles (Mega Man 10 is released in March so it'd be good timing too), and I'd end up turning into one of the Avatars that are used for the Xbox 360 menus, and are also implimented into some games such as Bomberman.

Hi me.

Course the main issue would be figuring out how copyrights would work for that stuff. Even if I don't make money off it, using existing characters and game footage without the correct permissions would be tricky (though since I'm somewhat friends with Tom Fulp, co-founder of the Behemoth, I may get permission to use something along the Castle Crashers theme). Also for authenticy, I would need to have one of the official avatar models, as well as the splash screens from the commercials, and I dunno if there's a bit of cash handling involved in getting those assets.

But yeah, that's something I'll worry about once I get this HMV Brief sorted.



More sketches

Warrior Designs

Pop Sirens

Alternative design of Warrior for his day job

More sketches + early storyboards

A few more designs I've drawn out for my project. This week's new addition: CYBER PENGUINS!!!

This takes influence from various cybernetic things and penguins, which vary from Teen Titan's Cyborg and Star Trek's Borgs to Madagascar's penguins and various other generic penguins.


Epic sketch of RNO versus our hero. Kinda which I had more felt tip colours at my disposal. Btw the katakana in the moon is 'n', the one I'm most familiar with.

To the left, a go at the dragon, kinda influenced by the big furry one from Neverending Story. To the right, a vampire wizard, a mash up of the current crazes of Harry Potter and that fish lipped guy from Twilight. Also featured are some cracks for the foil character who I'm just calling 'Smarmy Git', and a few attempts at the Warrior showing his emotional response.

Left: Professor Manegg once again. Here, I've done another throwback to the Sonic games that influenced his design by going through their logic of 'hitting things with hedgehogs makes them explode'. Right: Lil sketches of Warrior, Manegg, RNO and Fire Sumo.

I've made a start on a few early storyboards. I've also drafted up an early script.

Left to Right: Warrior vs Manegg, Warrior vs RNO and Warrior vs Cyber Penguin Army

A Look at HMV

So, to make an animation for HMV, I have to get a somewhat decent understanding about who it is I'm trying to appeal to (which would probably work better for me than when I went into doing a thing for a poker company with zero poker knowledge).



HMV is something of a multimedia store. Represented by it's well known logo of a dog named Nipper perked in front of a gramaphone, it's initial focus was as a record store. The name and mascot come from Francis Barraud's painting, "His Master's Voice". Nowadays, the stores sell the latest music, dvds, blu-rays and video games, as well as certain bits of technology such as headphones and iPods. Their competitors in this regard would be Zavvi (formerly Virgin Megastores), and various other online stores such as Play.com or Amazon. In regards to videogames, they also have competition from various game outlets such as GAME, Gamestation and GameStop. The website is also currently working on a download section, which I assume pertains mostly to music, but could also offer downloadable game titles similar to the Steam distribution service.



At current, their brand look features a lot of rounded fontage and focuses around three main colours; black, white and pink. Like it has done over the years, it also features their mascot, Nipper, in the logo. Oh, and there's usually some cockney geezer working the voiceovers. With what I have in mind, finding a way to incorporate the brand trademarks, which are generally futuristic and bold, into my epic adventure kind of theme, would be quite difficult. General protocol for adapting logos into these scenarios generally involved a patchwork or metallic theme, so if I saturate some of the colours I could make it work. Although dogs you can stick just about anywhere and they'll fit.



In fact, looking at various adverts for HMV, they're pretty much nothing beyond a trailer or music video with some logos and a price tag slapped on top sandwiched between some fancy transitions. In fact, this was the only advert I found that was any different.



What I plan to do is radically different from all of that (particularly cos I can't be arsed to go through all the legal brewha of sticking movie/music video footage into the thing). I want the advert to say, 'Come to HMV, we rock', as opposed to 'Oh hey this new thing is out and I suppose you can get it at this place'. It's all about making HMV a preference, not simply an option.

As far as determining a target audience goes, one thing to immediately point out is this is an online shop we're promoting her. To buy things from online shops, you need credit or debit cards, something I'm pretty sure noone under the age of 16 has, so we can cheerfully strike that age group out of the picture. Going with what they generally show on adverts, there's a lot of the latest actiony movies, interspersed with your generic X-Factor shit, which puts the average audience somewhere in the early 20s. If we take into account the media hungry university student, you're looking at a target audience of about 18-25, give or take a few years. Sticking in a lot of movie-like stuff into my animation should appease the young adults. ;P

Some more concept art

Been mostly sorting out my tax return this past week so there hasn't been too much time on this thing, but I have done a few more doodles.

I get the feeling I should watch Beowulf at some point

Knowing I have a general habit of coming up with one character design and more or less going with it (it comes from a job where you don't have time to waste on concepts), I decided to have a crack at some various designs, although they generally stuck to the beardy muscly variety, with the exception of the top left, which is influenced a little by Kratos from the God of War videogames. For the muscly designs, I tried thinking about how I can compose the dudes out of various shapes, mainly triangles and squares.

When thinking about the epic battle montage (what I may do is just produce one or two 30 second animations for the contest brief, then use the remainding time to make a full version for uni), one of the things that popped into my mind was the opening one and a half minutes of the ever-so infamous episode of the Super Mario World cartoon, Mama Luigi.



With 'Fire Sumo' fresh in my mind, I thought to myself, 'hey, there should BE a fire sumo'. Who's gonna make the connection? >_>

Fire SUMO!!!

So what you basically have is what it says on the tin, er, paper. A sumo, that's on fire. I drew it out with my fancy felt pens, starting with the orange outline, throwing in some yellow shade, then some more orange shade and finished off with some red highlighting to bring out the outlines. Marvellous. If I do go with Fire Sumo, I may present his scene in a traditional Japanese style (ie. not anime, think more that BBC Promo from the 2008 Olympics).

Also feature, an idea for an iPod-based badnik that never really caught on.

Since HMV sells its fair share of video games for sale, I figured it'd be fair game (sorry) to give that side some representation. When you think videogame nasties, a large number of people would most likely think of good ol' Dr Robotnik (aka Dr Eggman) from the Sonic games. And thus, came the creation of Professor Manegg, who represents the dark side of all things...erm egginess, sporting an easter-style pencil crayon face and a lil bread soldier sticking into his gooey insides. As well as the obvious Robotnik influence, I thought about the old-school videogame hero Dizzy, an egg who also sports red gloves and boots. This reference stuck out due to recently working on a Weebl series called '8 Bit Pwny Club', of which one of the characters also parodies Dizzy. I also drew up Professor Manegg in flash for the lulz.

The brown chequered background is a reference to Robotnik's ball of doom from Sonic 1.

Will post some more concept art, and maybe give a little thought into research, in the next post. Stay tuned!

The idea that will happen

Whilst contemplating the idea of the clockkeeping mouse (note to self: learn to title stuff better), the tutors brought up the idea of submitting competition briefs for design awards, something everyone participated in last year for the D&AD Awards.

'Black Hole Sheep' - my animation for Motion Graphics. It didn't win the D&AD award.

With the tutor generally deciding this year's briefs for D&AD were rather crap, another source of competition briefs were shown via the YCN Student Awards. This had a more appealing range of briefs, ranging from Cartoon Network to Monster Munch (the latter of which is surprisingly enough to be targeted at 18-25s, for nostalgia and student munchies I guess?)
The one that struck a chord with me was HMV's brief in which participants had to design something to promote their supposedly easy to use website. As I thought about what I could include, I thought...ADVENTURE!

Before you ask, yes, I am completely bonkers.

The main pitch I had stuck in my head, which would be about 60 seconds in length, or two 30 second TV spots, was to have a brave warrior, the most clichéd money can buy, go on an epic quest, fighting all sorts of horrific demons and monsters from legend, fiction and my spur-of-the-moment attaching of adjectives, all to get that one thing who truly desires.

A Scrubs Season 7 Boxset (or whatever's the commercially hip product of the time of release).

That's when we kick in the narrator, who tells us that the alternative is to use HMV's website to get the latest DVDs, music and games delivered straight to your door instead, to which our hero responds with a daytime friendly alternative to 'FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-!!!'

Some concepts for the idea, featuring Mr Burly (we'll just call him that for now.)

I pretty much just started the concept artwork for this project right in the middle of everyone else presenting their idea pitches, but the general idea was to have this rather OTT viking type dude with bulging muscles, tight leather trouses, and an ultra sexy beard. The influences speak for themselves, but since we apparently have to go about 'explaining' this stuff, they include Eddie Riggs from Brutal Legend, the Scotsman from Samurai Jack, Prometheus from Disney's Hercules, Gimli from Lord of the Rings, and more or less any large bearded person from a DC cartoon. Will look into over influences, as well as experiment with more designs, later on.

A fun aspect will be trying to come up with various threats that stand between our hero and his Zach Braff fix. It'd have 'parody' written all over it. Legends talk of a fierce dragon, I drew a fifty armed dragon. Those sirens Homer went against in Homer's Odysee? Let's remodel them into manufactured pop-sirens. The fearsome Black Knight of...y'know screw it, let's just throw in a Dragonball reference. And a giant killer octopus not good enough for ya? Three words.

RADIOACTIVE.
NINJA.
OCTOPUS.

Oh dear god, YES

Having pitched this idea as a back up for my clockkeeper idea, my tutor was quick to notice that I was a lot more enthusiastic about this kind of idea than the other one, to which the other students unanimously agreed. HMV ad it is then. And since I technically work in advertising (I do the occassional promotional tidbit as part of the Weebl's Stuff team), it'll be great experience. Naturally, there is that whole comfort zone thing to generally worry about, but I plan on going beyond the general use of flash, most likely implimenting the use of After Effects and Photoshop as well. I also recently downloaded some music creation software called FL Studio, so if I can figure the workings of that out, I might even be able to supply my own epic soundtrack instead of mooching off the various royalty free sources.

The flipside is that due to the competition's earlier deadline, I need to get the main beef of the animation completed by mid-March (the main module's deadline is in May), but it shouldn't be too much of an issue, as this is the kind of thing I'm good at, and I have a bit more motivation going for me. I know my general hope for this degree was to develop my skills into epic festival-short making proportions, but if I can apply the stuff I've learned into a kickass advert, that's bound to be a good push in the good ol career direction.

The idea that didn't happen

Okay, so following on from Rob Sprackling's talk, I got thinking about how I could put his advice to good work. Having heard his bit on creating a world and adding a contrasting element, and hearing one student say 'grandfather clock' I thought a contrast to a grandfather clock would be a digital LCD clock. So I thought about there being wise old mice living in a grandfather clock, who gets visited by LCD shaped aliens from a digital watch ship. My general thought was to keep it to one, elderly and probably lonely old mouse.

Mockup of Clockkeeper. Lineart in Photoshop, CG in Art Rage 2.

I thought of a mice for the main character since, as any fan of Hickory Dickory will tell you, clocks and mice go hand in hand. Influences for the character design above can attributed to typical kindly sage type people, as well as various animated mouse features such as An American Tail and The Tale of Desperaux. The staff thing can be attributed to many staff carrying people of all kinds, particularly ones with magic powers such as Mumbo's wand from Banjo Kazooie, and I think Clank uses one in Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time.

Quickie mock up drawn in Flash.

When it came to his alien friend, I took inspiration from LCD digits you find on alarm clocks, although the main issue came from trying to figure out a look that both represents this and would animate well. The most common design was a simple body and head piece, with blue backlight (inspired by my old digital watch) for its eyes and a number on its front. Not particularly sure what it would have been for, but it could've been used to show expression or, in the case of multiple ones, as an identifier. The general look is reminiscent of Eve from Wall-E, with a little touch of Mr. Game and Watch, the hero of various LCD games (this was also a type of animation I considered for it). A general problem would be how he would interact with things, since the cubic nature of the character is rather restrictive.

The main, and probably fatal, issue was trying to come up with a story that links the two characters together and gives it meaning. I was hoping to aim for one of those buddy movies much like the majority of Pixar animations (Wall-E, Up and Finding Nemo ring bells). One plot point I considered was for the mouse to have a grandson who was unfortunately killed by a mischievious cat, leading the elder mouse to become lonely, scared of the outside world and untrusting of others. His design is a little reminiscent of one of my own characters, Bunnycat, who like my other character, sports a pair of goggles, though his pair would be more fitting to the timeline.

When I showed this idea to my tutor, the idea of a grandfather clock scenario was well received, but there was general criticism over the necessity of the LCD alien, my inability to fixate on a story and the general overhyping of things (a problem that bit me in the butt during Date for One's production).

And that's when I showed them my other idea.