Premise: Idea Development

After my meeting with Alan I have further developed my idea for the premise animation. I initially had an idea of making a world out of the things that I constantly lose and somehow basing the animation around a world entitled "the land of the lost" having cities made out of lost phones, and cigarette lighters, the world could have been split up into sections with a section being "clumsy quarters" that would be a trip down memory lane into things that I have experienced.  I also had another idea which depicts what it feels like to have anxiety. Alan thought it would be a good idea to mesh these two ideas together - having anxiety linked with losing something. There is a couple of scenarios that come to mind.

Scenario 1: Airport 1

After putting his boarding pass though the security tray with his other belongings, the character realises that when his belongings come back out that his boarding pass is nowhere to be seen, his flight is leaving soon, he starts to panic and the sounds around him of the hustle and bustle of the airport start to blur and the figures around him start to morph as his anxiety peaks.

He frantically starts to ask people who work for the airport if they have seen it anywhere, they give him dirty looks and say they will check but only give a few glances around the machine to see if it has fallen, the main characters anxiety starts to build to a climax with the people seeming distorted and the sounds muffled until his bubble of nervousness is popped when a gentleman hands him his boarding pass. This scenario could also be delved comically deeper into a possible longer animation into the Airport Scenario 2.

Scenario 2: Airport 2

A group of friends are getting a flight home, they are already late and as the main characters bag was too heavy to put on the plane he has to take out a lot of his clothes and wear them instead. the character ends up wearing multiple t-shirts, 2 pairs of pants and 2 pairs of sunglasses on his head.

The characters are already going to be late for their flight and after realising that his boarding pass doesn’t come out of the conveyer belt and nobody to ask for help because nobody spoke English, the main character starts to panic and realise that his two friends who were in front of him have ran ahead of him to the boarding gate.  His anxiety worsens and things start to blur and distort as he realises he can’t get on the flight without his boarding pass, he can’t ask anyone for help and he doesn’t know where the gate is, his “friends” have left him with people all around gawking at him. He eventually makes it to his friends who are not at the gate but are now at the bar across from the gate after realising they have missed the flight. the 3 characters sit outside the airport in the sun with their multiple whiskeys and coke’s after spending hundreds of euros for another flight.

Scenario 3: Bike

A character has a new bike, he is cycling down a hill with multiple cars behind him when he realises that his shoe lace has come undone - he thinks nothing of it,

As he is going down the hill he notices that his right foot starts to feel tight, he comes to the bottom of the hill as there is traffic lights up ahead, his foot starts to feel really compacted, he looks down at his shoe and realises that his shoe lace has somehow rapped around the right pedal of the bike and has started to pin his foot to the side of it. He is starting to panic, the environment starts to morph and liquefy as he is starting to come to a stop at the traffic lights with his foot now completely stuck the side of the bike, he comes to a stop and with his foot now pinned to the bike he slowly... steadily starts to veer to the right and falls completely flat on his face. He is unable to get back up as he is stuck to the bike, some of the cars behind him are beeping (and laughing) because the lights have gone green, 

the character frantically pulls the coil of shoelace from the pedal and limps to the side of the road as he lets the cars pass.

Aesthetic and feel:

I want to use Maya to make it look 2D and abstract with more traditional animation techniques. Alan showed me previous students work such as the animation below that I feel will really fit with the aesthetic of the animation, When the anxiety of the character starts to peak I want it to feel disjointed with the background blurring and distorting into abstract shapes. I want the sound design to mimic this feeling also

In hindsight a lot of these situations are hilarious so I want to show the humour in it but also show the anxiety that was felt in those situations. I also want to show how the character has evolved from these situations and has grown up and learned from them and now as an adult has found his feet.  

I’m not sure how the animation is going to play out yet. If it is going to be one scenario or many. The land of the lost idea feels like a half idea at the moment but maybe if I brought in the idea with the land of the lost and had the items that were lost such as the boarding pass or passport trigger the different scenarios that play out?.