Design For Media, Ron Saks Project Week 01:

As I began to discuss with my last DFM post, I made an animatic for a short I'd like to produce called "Stand Out", featuring the song of the same name by Tevin Campbell as the driving force of the story.

As with any story though, an important part of the process is refining what you've already made for the sake of both clarity and entertainment. Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be remaking this animatic to strengthen this story to the best of my ability.

If you'd like to see my completed first pass at it from last year, it's right here:


THE STORY "SCRIPT":

We follow the tale of a young man leading a dreary and monotonous life in gray-scale world. The girl of his dreams doesn't know he exists and spends her time with a conceited man concerned only with his own self-image. Our hero musters the courage to try and impress this girl, and he finds in himself the power to "stand out", to literally become the color of his emotions. He gets her attention, but the conceited man's influence on the girl is to strong to overcome so easily.

Our hero is not dissuaded, and intensifies his pursuit, trying ever more elaborate ways to "stand out" for this girl. He knows that if he could only get her alone and away from the conceited man, he would be able to prove himself more loyal and affectionate. The conceited man continues to push back, and knowing that he is losing this battle, decides to flee with the girl.

Our hero at this point becomes desperate, wondering just what he has to do to win this girl over. He places his faith in one last gamble, climbing the tallest building in the city and hijacking a blimp so his message can be seen by the entire populous. Upon seeing this, the girl finally frees herself from the conceited man, and discovers that with the support of her new friend, she too has the power to "stand out" from the sea of grayscale faces.

END

Well how bout that? a lovely 3 "act" structure

I like this story not only because of it's simplistic love story and visual potential/possibilities, but also because of the "Straw Man Fallacy" qualities of the villain character, in that we really don't know much about him other than how our "hero" perceives him.

Thus far, I've only updated the opening of the animatic, about 20 seconds, and I'm trying to play around with the camera a bit more this time to make more interesting shots/transitions. Hopefully you can see some improvements already, but it's still early days yet. Also there are some timing issues with this version because Youtube loves to desync the audio of .mov files, so please bear with me. The audio is a little bit ahead of the visuals, as you'll notice that the girl and the conceited man aren't supposed to react until the singing starts, but the singing starts before we even cut to the shot of them in front of the camera:



as always, any comments or critiques are welcome and appreciated.