Lots of ideas but we finally got it down to a coffee shop

Honestly September and October have been hell when trying to get a solid idea. For most of October we didn't really know what we wanted to do, we just had 1 thing in mind which was a character combination of Superman and Michael Jackson. From there we had no where else to go. Last week on Tuesday we sat in the New Media Lab for 6 hours with a bunch of pictures of Superman and Michael Jackson hoping to come up with something, anything. We wanted it to be funny and we wanted it to at least make some sort of point (or we felt we had to).

Thank god we ran into Dave Green in the hallway. He pretty much told us that the combination of our character was funny enough and whatever we do next doesn't matter much as it would be funny anyone. So for that day Ferry and I just wrote down as many scenes we could come up with as Dave had suggested just so we could get the foot in the door. We tried to get some more work done the following Thursday but didn't get much done. However by the end of last week we had a face of our character and had agreed on a look and feel of the movie by looking at several examples.

Knowing how hard it is to produce an animation from start to finish I suggested a detailed character but a simple environment to put him in. The look and feel we both agreed would work was something similar to the animated short Defective. I really thought it was a perfect look because the environment is simple yet descriptive of the setting and it still looks good aesthetically. The characters are also simple but too simple, we wanted something more realistic but believable so we choose to model our characters after the short Buckets.

I felt we still hadn't made enough progress, we had talked to James, Ira, and Dave from the faculty and had some direction but were missing a story. We decided to meet this past Sunday at Yorkdale mall to finalize something. I was determined to not leave till we had a story in our mind. We found a local Sub-way, grabbed a sandwich and some coffee and started brainstorming. After going through our list of scenes we choose one to play off of and it seemed to roll out the best. This was originally Ferry's idea and a funny one!

Essentially Superman (in a parallel universe is Michael Jackson) decides to drop by a coffee shop for his coffee. He runs into a robber who also tends to be a fan of the hero and gets stuck signing autographs and snapping pictures until eventually he loses his temper.

The fact that we would have to deal with just one set, a coffee shop was fantastic it meant less work overall and more concentration on 1 set alone. We had to stick with this for sure and so far are! I hope ED doesn't screw us over :) (ED is the head honcho here in our program)

We storyboarded the intro to climax at that sub-way in rough form and jotted down a quick screenplay, nothing in stone yet. Ferry is working on a neat copy of the storyboard so we can show it to the faculty to get better feedback. I feel we are finally on our way.

On a completely separate note: I know we are far from finalizing things but they must be done soon. Ferry and I both are following a Maya tutorial that helps us make a character from start to finish, this will hopefully get us ready by the time we start modeling everything I want us to start our character work early November.