Monday, March 30, 2009

Digital Cel premise

I've had a lot of fleeting ideas to use as a premise for my Digital Cel Animation project, including a music video for the song "I Think I Smell a Rat" by the White Stripes. There are one or two ideas that I'm undecided on.
One of the better developed ones is a story about a little girl playing with her mother's bathroom things, playing dress-up and trying on jewelry. She accidentally drops a ring down the sink and the only way to get it out is to employ her pet hamster/gerbil/mouse, who dons an explorer hat and gets lowered down into the drain by a rope. Then he has a brief adventure, probably fighting a cockroach or something, retrieves the ring, and brings it back to the little girl.

I had other ideas, too, but this one seemed most straightforward. It's probably way too ambitious, however, and I'm trying to find a more simple premise to work with.

2 comments:

Yale said...

I think you may be right about the too ambitious thing. I like the idea a lot, but considering the time limit of what we're going to be working on (not that there is one, but you wanna keep things reasonable) I'd say you need to choose between the girl's playing dress-up or the hamster's adventures. You can still do both things, but you have to choose on which part you really wanna spend time on. You could have the girl playing dress up as the focus, then she drops the ring, and the hamster goes and finds it relatively quickly. Or, on the other hand, you could have her drop the ring almost immediately, deploy the hamster, and then make the short about his attempts to retrieve it. Just play around with it, but I look forward to seeing it.

Cat Brooks said...

Thanks for the comment! I am definitely with you on the possibility of there being two stories to have to deal with. My plan, if I choose to persue this premise further, is to have the girl drop the ring almost immediately, in the establishing shot even. Then it would cut to a quick panic face, she'd run off to get the hamster, and then the hamster would get lowered down. Then the hamster could almost immediately meet up with the problem in the drain (I still can only think of a quick cockroach battle or something), get the ring, and bring it back.

If I thought fairly hard about it then I could probably shorten it down anyway, ha ha.