Tuesday, November 2, 2010

This Idea I have Brewing

Since my final project is based on Sloth, I look up the fable of The Grasshopper and the Ants. The narrative I am working on strongly follows the morality of that fable.
I want to focus on a nutria and a family of egrets. The egrets are hard working fishermen and the nutria is a lazy scavenger of stale bread thrown to the ducks by humans.
So, that's where I have started and then I moved onto what is going to be happening in this narrative. I asked myself: How will I introduce these characters? How do they become the way they are?
Here is the story that I came up with...
Perhaps the nutria becomes an orphan and a family of egrets adopts him. The mother egret teaches her babies and the nutria to fish in the canal, but the nutria does not pay attention to the fishing lesson because he is more interested in the free food being feed to the ducks up on the neutral ground. So, the nutria never learns to fish and he gets fat and lazy as he feeds off of stale bread. His egret siblings are successful fishermen and have an abundant supply of delicious fish. The nutria sees how the egrets are eating much better than he is and he wants a share of their food. The nutria goes to his siblings for food, but they rebuke him. So, the obese nutria goes into the canal to try to catch fish for himself but he does not know how. As he struggles to catch a fish, the nutria becomes prey himself and is eaten by an alligator.

Of course the story may be modified before my pitch, but this is what I have so far. I'm now also working on character designs, style, color palette, and environments so I can start making assets as soon as possible.
I'm not sure if the nutria getting eaten by the alligator is the best form of death to deliver my message, but starvation seems like it would be hard to strongly portray in animation, while expecting a strong reaction.
I also need to find a way to show a time lapse of the nutria becoming fatter and lazier over time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAd0jOuQg8o

The ending to my piece is obviously not going to be a happy ending as in the Disney short of the Grasshopper and the Ants.

Here are some character sketches.

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