Dim Progress Check #5 - “A Healthy Detour and Moment of Clarity”
Throughout the working on our story, there has been a recurring pattern. When we encounter an issue with the story, it seems we take very drastic shifts to make those changes. For example, in our first iteration of the story, the climactic “fight scene” felt like it needed involvement from the children that Finn saved, rather than just Finn against the Ring Master. This resulted in a weird, but loveable, Voltron homage-style laser show. Another example was when a story beat involving Finn and the other children playing was viewed as unnecessary. In response, we scrapped the whole scene and redefined the purpose of the other workers within our story.
While these examples may seem small, in our less than five-minute animation, these changes are slowly bringing us away from the story we initially started with, for better and for worse. I think the epitome of these changes is where we are currently. Through another series of brainstorming and iterating, we’ve now generated a story that is about Rory, who was previously a foil to Finn. This arose through the realization that Finn needed a clearly defined arc, something along the lines of understanding the importance of his power and/or understanding his impact on his friends. Through breaking down this, we realized that Finn was more one-dimensional and less relatable than Rory. In hindsight, the solution was to develop Finn’s role in the story more, but I do believe this shift into telling a story about Rory is a healthy thing to get out of our system. Attached is a qucik Animatic based on shot descriptions and quick sketches we did during brainstorming.
Howard brought to our attention that what we presented in our previous animatic review wasn’t bad, and encouraged us to deeply reflect on our initial story and why it was impactful to those of us in our team and the many others who deeply wanted to work on this story. In the upcoming days, I will be personally revising and pitching a new seven steps of our story based on the armature all of our iterations seemingly have.
After editing a quick animatic we threw together for our Rory story, I don’t believe Rory acts any more like the main character in this one than Finn does in our initial story. I think a much-needed simplification and reevaluation of essential elements of our story will help bring clarity.
