In the beginning…

Everything is usually right as rain; this is true of stories, movies and apparently the first week of school.

During the holidays I spent a lot of time trying to come up with doable ideas for my animation this year mostly to no avail. On the way home one night I saw some tail lights lit up on a parked car that reminded me of this http://mikepmitchell.deviantart.com/art/Death-of-Neon-146175937 characters eyes and the ancient Steam-Boat-Willie style. I thought ‘what if I could try to place that old black and white style in a modern character’. That idea became a little teenage robot I named Machan (‘friend’ or ‘Mate’ in French). Originally the idea was quite complex as I thought our animation this year would be quite long (about 5 mins). Machan was supposed to represent teenagers and the world was supposed to represent adolescence. The beautiful world through the big doors was supposed to represent adulthood and the robot guarding the door was supposed to represent the shitty trials teenagers go through to get to adulthood. I was going to represent this through the dialogue between the guard and Machan as well as the visuals that would show up in Machan’s tv-like eyes. Machan was also going to speak different languages to represent the fact that he was ‘teenagers’ in general not just western teenagers. His headphones/ears and eyes where supposed to represent the hold technology has over teenagers and how much it is integrated into their lives these days. Towards the end of the holiday I did some concept art as well as a test animation to show to Jack and ask how doable my ‘tv eyes’ idea was.

The first week of school gave me some more confidence in my choice to go with 3D this year, a style I have little competence in. Jack is a reassuring element and it is mostly on the strength of his knowledge that I decided to choose 3D. The fact that the animation is supposed to be so short meant that I needed to rehash my Machan idea but part of the reason I love the story so much is that it is so malleable. I easily cut it down (taking away the metaphors, conversation with the guard and the guard following Machan into the beautiful world) and wrote a script for it within the first week. I felt the brainstorming we did with Huni was very productive and helped this editing process. I was surprised at how quickly work began and how soon due dates are set but I came at this year with an idea that I would have to be working doubly hard all year so it wasn’t difficult to adjust to the idea that things where happening so quickly.

As I said, this is just the beginning.
Week 1, Miss Tune signing off.