Bots and Bananas
Second year, first project, first post of a new academic year.
In this project the general idea is to make a robot slip over a banana with the duration of the video being no less than a minute and no more than 5 minutes, but there is more to that than just what it says in the project brief. This project is more to do with slapstick comedy. We started the project by looking at classic slapstick comedians like Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and so on. Looking at these comedians and studying their style of comedy will help later in the animation process of this project.
What makes a good slapstick formula?
Looking at what makes a good slapstick formula will help in the writing/storyboarding of my idea for this project, in class we worked in groups then shared out ideas to the class to try and get a list of words and sentences that sum up a good formula for slapstick comedy, this is what we got; repetition, being in outrageous yet believable situations, the exaggeration of pretty much anything for example violence, timing and delivery is crucial, taking jokes to the limit without crossing the line and jokes that exceed common sense. Having an understanding of what makes a good slapstick joke will make it easier when it comes to creating my plot to my animation.
Robot Designs
From the start of this project I wanted the animation itself in this short film to be fluid and as real as possible, having the animation and motion telling the story. With this in mind I wanted to keep the design of my robot pretty basic, so it would be easy to model, easy to rig and then hopefully be easy to animate.
I eventually decided that this next sketch would be my final design, although there’s still a few things here and there that I will change once modelling it.
Storyboard
I had an idea for my story and I went for it, and when I gave my presentation Andy said that it would work fine, which I was happy with. The basic story is that a cleaning robot walks past a zoo where a monkey has thrown a banana over the wall, the robot picks it up and he’s like ‘yeah!’ Then as the robot is about to walk away another banana hits him on the head, he looks up with an annoyed face, before turning to walk away, but forgetting about the banana peel he slips over and falls to the floor. Un suspecting to hit a monkey hurls some faeces over the wall which in slow motion goes towards his face, before it hits him in the face its goes to black. Finish. With the use of Foley and sound editing I am hoping to make the monkeys an audio character, being one of the main characters in the story but only being there through sound.
More blogging soon!
