503 - Idea Development 1

Our group had another session yesterday, where we discussed our chosen idea more, and started to develop it:

We organised our ideas into categories, noting down every idea we discussed so we have more options to choose from. Our goal for this animation is to subvert the viewer's expectations - make them feel like the Girl is the victim and then change that around, therefore we started thinking about the design of both the characters (making them almost stereotypes so the audience automatically assumes who the bad guy is) as well as the backgrounds, thinking about adding elements in to suggest their natures. 

Adding on to that is the idea that the Girl's apartment should look very homely and cute from afar, but the closer you get the more things seem off.

The locations for the story are also very important, because we need to move the Creep (with cuts) from his apartment to her apartment across several location jumps during a long period of time, and make it flow nicely and so that it makes sense. The locations will also determine what actions the Creep sees the Girl doing.

 

Finally, we also started planning how the story would unfold, splitting it into start, middle and end. Our ending is clear, however we spent some time discussing the film's opening scenes. The problems we were having was that we wanted an establishing shot to show the location where this takes place (the apartments), however we then needed to transition into the Creep's POV. To help communicate the idea to Ceylin and Kahenya, I did a quick storyboard: 

It starts with an establishing shot of the Creep's apartment building, zooming in on his window where you can see inside. The creep then moves in front of the window, silhouetted by the light behind him. The camera then cuts to his POV.

My group liked this idea, however Kahenya argued that it may be better to not show the Creep at all, as it'll be more mysterious and more fitting with the film's goals. I agreed with this, as we want the audience to exaggerate this guy's creepiness in their minds, and showing his silhouette would ruin that somewhat.

Kahenya also suggested that in the establishing shot we show both apartment buildings facing each other, like this scene from The Witness:

 

We agreed that this would be better as it would show the Creep's apartment in relation to the Girl's, so that the audience would be able to understand it better.

I went and thought about how we could achieve this later on, and came up with this sequence:

I quite like this as it allows us to cut to the Creep's POV without revealing his aesthetics at all, and it shrouds him in more mystery. It also reveals more of his personality and makes him seem creepier due to the act of him closing his blinds solely to watch someone across the street with binoculars. 

With that sequence, the title card appearing could be in two places. This would have to be figured out in the animatic stage to see which one works better.

The next aspects we should focus on are coming up with an exact script and finding a sequence of events that will work for the main bulk of the short, and then storyboarding the scenes to come up with interesting shot compositions.