Christmas Breakdown

As a group we were feeling pretty confident in the work we had done leading up to the presentation at the end of the fist term, in which we had to re-pitch the film with updated visuals and more of a plan for the next two months. The short version of this story is that we pitched it and it didn't work. We could tell from peoples reaction that it wasn't engaging at all, it was too long and everyone was confused with the story. The way I thought about it, the more you have to describe the story the less it actually made sense, the story should more or less speak for itself even in the early stages. Mike told us that it needed a lot of work and it didn't take us long to realise that he was completely right.

We all went away from the presentation feeling pretty down about the project and felt like we'd invested a lot of time into a project that was fundamentally flawed. We met up soon after and attempted to mold a new story around the characters we had already been working on. We all felt that they were really strong characters and were confident there was a story idea that would be much more achievable and clear that we could tailor to them. We spent a long time trying to churn this idea out and, to be fair, we came up with a couple of good ones. We settled eventually on an idea in which both wizards are on a quest to find a legendary 'all powerful' wand, and that they travelled together through a number of harsh, testing environments (forests, caves, deserts, snow, etc). The idea was that the vain wizard had come really well prepared with a good tent and a bag full of survival gear, and the crude wizard had next to nothing. So as the vain wizard travels through the different environments, successfully braving each one because of he planning, the crude wizard was suffering every time. Eventually they reached their destination and saw the wand that they wanted on the top of a hill, which they furiously race to the top of before finding that it was a trick of perspective and it was on a mountain even further away. Both wizards vault off the cliff and the story theoretically continued! Below is a picture of the beginning of the film that I story boarded:

We all quite liked the story, but looking back on it now I think it lacked a real ending or resolution (though it does lend itself to a cheeky sequel). We all started working on it straight away for a couple of days, but I really felt that it wasn't going to work, and that tailoring the idea to the characters had made for a weaker story. I don't doubt that we would have got it finished and all worked hard on it, but we only got one chance to do a film like this where we can be in complete creative control for a whole year and I really wanted it to be something we could all be proud of. We discussed possibilities as a group and settled that myself and Joe would go away and come up with three new ideas, and if the group couldn't settle on one then we'd continue with the wizards idea.

We aimed to for the new stories to have really simple story lines, with a clear beginning and end and for it to be light hearted, and proceeded to come up with three ideas that we felt met all the criteria. Myself and Joe spent an evening trying to formulate some ideas which we were due to pitch to the group the next day. We did come up up with three fully formed ideas, though I felt one in particular was the strongest which was Going Down. The other two ideas were about a girl who buys a turtle and comes home to set everything up for it and he falls off the side he was put on, so desperately tries to get her attention as she runs round the room searching for him in a panic. The other idea was a small, nervous man getting on the train to the afterlife when a huge fat man sits next to him on the train and falls asleep on him. They are both due to get off at heaven but the fat guy blocks him in, meaning that if he can't get himself out he will end up at the next stop after that which is, of course, hell, and the film would have been a very short piece of him struggling to move past the fat guy in the seat next to him.

This then leaves the third option, which was by far our favourite. Put as simply as possible, an intern is working late in an office. Having fallen asleep at his desk, he goes to leave in the lift when it stops at a floor he didn't request and a zombie wanders in. The a moment of awkwardness and some desperate maneuvering but the intern manages to evade the zombie, only to reach the bottom floor and find that the lobby is filled with them. The end. It was short, simple and not overly ambitious from a digital perspective, and the rest of the group loved it. Needless to say, we had to work immediately to catch up on the term we ha wasted, so we all got cracking.

 This was the state of things every day for about two months after that moment!