The Present

Ahh, well this idea made it all the way to Animatic stage.

The inspiration is a painting called 'The Present'

The Present

They say a picture tells a thousand words. This painting suggests many things i think. But this woman does not look to happy about her gift. Wow, the possibilities of a story adaption are endless. I liked the idea of a lonely guy finding a gift, which ends up making an irritating sound, to such a point that its wrapped up and thown back out

While discussing the idea with Claudia K, One of my good friends, I suddenly realised it would be even funnier if this guy thought he was rid of the annoying gift, but his pet parrot had picked up the noise, and when he returns home, he hears his parrot mimick the noise.
I also wanted this to all be in an alien environment, I didnt want to adhere to realism, which I sometimes find myself doing. So I decided he would be an alien, his parrot would be an Astro-Parrot (?) and the trees and stuff would be stylised.

The Sketches

Main Character - Wally

Astro Parrot

And not forgetting:



The Story Beats

I wanted to clearly know where the beats of the story changed, so I wrote down all the emotional changes







The Animatic

I felt the annoying sound was the pivotal part of the story, so I spent quite a few hours on that. here is the First Animatic:



The Animatic - Take 2

It turns out my annoying sound was actually too annoying for one of my lecturers to bare, tee hee. Knowing this, I was a bit concerned, especially if our stuff ends up being played in the National Gallery (over and over).
So I tried to create a more subtle sound without loosing the feel. I was also told to add more drawings for the character entering and leaving certain scenes.




This is when I began to realise that the majority of the film was spent walking from one place to another, and also that I had two whole environments to design...... doubt overwhelmed me, especially when it occured to me that the more memorable a story is , the more chance someone would watch it again, and in this case, I would be lucky if anyone would actually endure this more than once.
So I began looking at ways of using my characters, but in a different scenario, perhaps a different painting would inspire something?