Diner Story Idea

In the early morning hours (4-5AM) a small diner located beneath a train track is empty except for the burly short order cook who is slowly wiping down the counter top. The lights in the diner begin to flicker as an passing train shakes everything that is not bolted down. After the train passes a short hobo with a flushed face and tattered clothes enters the diner. The hobo walks up to the bar, sits down and motions to the cook that he would like some coffee. In an irritated manner the cook points to the marquee where the price, 5 cents, is listed as the cost for coffee. The hobo smiles awkwardly and begins to dig in his pockets hastily. The hobo places the contents of his pocket on the table and begins to push each penny toward the cook. However after the third penny the hobo tries to pass off a couple buttons as pennies. This is quite obvious to the cook who scorns the hobo with a look of frustration, but the hobo returns to searching in his pocket for some other item to exchange. As the situation looks more and more futile, a beautiful female waitress enters the diner. She is early for shift change. Immediately the expression on the cooks face softens as he ogles her. She sits down softly in a booth and picks up a paper lying near by. As the cook falls into a trance, it becomes obvious to the hobo that there is a connection between the waitress and the cook that has yet to be explored and an opportunity for him to facilitate. While the cook rests his head in his hand leaning on the bar, the hobo slowly reaches up and plucks the cooks hat off his head. The cook is jolted out of his daze and begins to scold the hobo, but the hobo gestures to the cook to go over and sit with her. Eventually the cook hands over his apron and sheepishly moves over to the table and asks to sit down. The jolly little hobo trots over to the table and serves each one of them a hot fresh cup of coffee. As we watch the waitress and the cook begin to have playful banter, the camera pulls back to reveal the hobo quietly and happily sipping a cup of hot coffee.

Western Short

Okay there are a couple 3D westerns out there after all. One of them is surprisingly like the 'John Hu Samurai Cowboy' pitch, but thats for you guys to decide. Its name is "Los Gringos" the the architectural style and setting is much what I had envisioned for this western idea, although it can be pushed a few different ways. There is even a 3D spaghetti western parady (it was pretty good, although a lot of its pizazz is in the credits).





I've been kicking around a few other scenarios that seemed to help push some of the ideas of the old west:
1- A young man waits in the upstairs of a saloon. The room is somewhat humming and vibrates from the noise and drunken debauchery below as muffled piano music and loud crude yells of laughter fill the upstairs hotel suite. He stares into his pocket watch which not only is giving him the time, but reveals the tin-type of his wife. He envisions his wife sitting by the fire knitting. The room is calm and harm from the fire with a cooking pot brewing. Back to the man in the saloon, the hum from below breaks the calm of the flashback. Two people, a man and a woman, clatter laughingly as they can be heard coming towards the room. The young man nervously moves to the corner of the room positioning himself. The door breaks open with an rough older looking man shocked to see who is in the room. The call girl gives off a scream and runs back down the hall. The young man raises his gun just as another flashback cuts in. The wife is in the room knitting and door breaks open to cabin and the rough looking man enters. She gives a horrified scream. Flash foreword- the young man pauses and then painfully pulls the trigger. The point of view is now from the call girl, nervously looking from the stairwell. The young man slowly walks out of the room and down the stairs with an unsatisfied look on his face. As he passes the call girl he drops a pouch of money on the floor next to her. The music and laughter downstairs is still loud- masking the violence that occured above.

This is obviously a subtle revenge piece that is intended to tribute the calm frontier of the west against the not yet civilized wild, and in some cases, lawless saloon crowd that ran rampant during this period of time.

The next piece isn't nearly as worked out as the first.
2- A law officer is forced to uphold the law when a mob comes to the sheriffs quarters one evening. They want to lynch this ruthless killer confined the back jail room. The sheriff has to struggle between the law of the land and the law of the wild west- which can be very conflicting perceptions. Before mob arrives his relationship with the prisoner is shown to be negative. The prisoner is a snake that deserves to die, but somehow is only imprisoned do to court complications. The underlying theme is: 'what is true justice'. After some research, mobs typically overthrew prisoners to preform lynchings under their own code of regulation.

Appalachain Project

Here are some early renders of props for the Appalachain project. Beyond the modeling, I am playing with image based lighting using HDR images to get a realistic lighting setup that we can actually capture from the environment we will be filming in.

The Red House on Grey Road (and similar ideas)

This story is inspired by the poem, "Casas enfiladas" by Alfonsina Storni:

Casas enfiladas, casas enfiladas,

casas enfiladas.

Cuadrados, cuadrados, cuadrados.

Casas enfiladas.

Las gentes ya tienen el alma cuadrada,

ideas enfila

y angulo en la espalda.

Yo misma he vertido ayer una lágrima,

Dios mio, cuadrada.

Translated as:

Houses in a line, in a line,

In a line there,

Squares, squares, squares,

Even people now have square souls,

Ideas in file, I declare,

And on their shoulders, angles wear.

Just yesterday I shed a tear and it

Oh, God, was square!

Literature scholar Sidonia Rosenbaum refers to the poem as a forceful and poignant interpretation of modern city life, with its piercing loneliness, its chilling indifference, its soulless uniformity and maddening monotony, its spiritual vacuity, its unending vulgarity…which rots and perplexes the soul…The same mathematical impersonality of the houses in rows, in angles, in squares, is reflected in their souls, in their ideas, in their very physical outlines and even…in her own tears

As a HUGE oversimplification, the poem, to me, is about conformity. Obviously my idea needs further development--the narrative is pretty weak as is--but the poem lends itself to some exciting visual interpretations that should be teased out. Here is my knee jerk reaction:

(verses of the poem are heard at appropriate times throughout the short film)

Inside a modern home a man is watching TV. From a point of view from behind the TV set, we see him flipping through channels listlessly. We catch snipits of audio clips of what he hears. "…now there’s a quick and easy way to lose 50 pounds in just two weeks!.." "gas prices reached an all time high today…" "want to look like your favorite celebrity? Now you can…"etc. (the point here is to convey that he is saturated in pop culture BS and news spin).

Frustrated, the man gets up and walks out his door. The streets are lined with many different colored, two-story houses (think suburbia). No one is around, but the sound and glow of a television can be seen coming from the windows of each home he passes. He continues to walk, passing one empty yard after another, when something causes him to stop. We see him from a profile shot. He is standing in the middle of the street. A house is behind him. The focus is on him, and the house behind is blurrily out of focus. As he stands there, the focus shifts to the house. It suddenly—instantly—loses its color and becomes stark grey. Shocked, he looks around. Another house loses its color. A pause. Then another. Pause. Another.

A great camera pan from the sky shows the street lined with houses. Many are colored. Some are nothing but grey. Another of the houses suddenly loses its color, becoming a dull grey in an instant. Shortly thereafter, another house does the same thing. Then another. And another. All the while the time between houses losing their color is getting shorter and shorter. Cutting to a street level view facing only one side of the street, we zoom quickly down the road. Our character is running back to his home, trying to outrun the chain reaction of homes losing their color; as he runs, houses whiz by in the background, losing their color one by one. He finally reaches his house and dives inside, slamming the door. The rush of color loss skips his house, but the chain reaction continues down the row with the next house beside him and so on.

Zooming out we see this red house is the lone splash of color in our suburban hell. Cutting to a close up shot of our character looking desperately out his window, a tear begins to well up in his eye. As it is about to fall, his home instantly loses its color. We still hear the TV droning in the background and see its flashing lights illuminate the room behind him. His tear drops, but it falls to the ground as a cube

******************************************************************************************************************

I was looking through some of my old writings and found this piece of freewriting from years ago. Another seed for a story.

Every man needs some sort of inspiration. A muse, if you will. I am a firm believer that we all have it embedded somewhere inside of us. It is the genius, however, that is able to bring it out, to turn himself inside out and give us that unique view from within. And even then, we cannot comprehend it. The genius exposes himself for us to see. But we can only postulate, make guesses at the true meaning of their art. Our minds can only see things in three dimensions while the levels of their imaginations are infinite. So we look on in wonder, but are never truly aware of the real significance of the work. That secret knowledge lies locked away in the mind of the creator, the genius, while we, the humble masses are left confused and dumbfounded.

Conformity, I felt, would become self-expression, and complacency, inspiration. With this knowledge, I felt I could restore inspiration back into this otherwise bland world.

Our world is quite uninspired. Quite boring.

They arrested me once for sculpting. Twice for painting, and four times for creative writing. My work was seized and destroyed on the spot. Thankfully they didn’t find my hidden gallery in the cellar. I was put in prison for a total of twelve years where I sat in a cell and almost withered away. They air in their prison seemed to suck the life out of me. The walls were cold and gray. The walkways were formed in a perfect grid of parallel lines. The people there were removed and complacent, never showing any signs of identity. Our uniforms were white. The guards dressed in all black. Everyone’s head was shaved taking away from us the only luxury of self expression allowed to us in the outside world.

Understand that the anguish you experience in a place like that isn’t physical. It’s mental torture. They whittle you away with idleness until you’re nothing. They rot your brain away with disuse so that when you get out you fit back into the system without any resistance. They bend your will to theirs and force it upon you until the day you die. You might as well be dead. You concede life and accept existence.

But I got out. I did not concede.

Mirrors and Mannequins (working title)

Normal mannequin and plus sized mannequin:



This is the basic plot of my idea so far: (UPDATED as of 7/10/08)

The setting of the story is a warehouse. A large wooden box is delivered to the warehouse by handtruck and left in the center of the room. The camera has been close to the ground so far so that you can only see the feet and legs of the delivery man as it follows him to the center of the room. When the delivery man leaves, most of the lights are turned off except for one spotlight on the box. The camera zooms out a little bit but remains close to the ground so that the shot is framed by the legs of the mannequins in the warehouse. A plus sized mannequin steps out of the box and starts to look around. She walks up to a mannequin directly in front of her and looks it over. She then walks along the row of mannequins and you can see their reflections in the large mirror along the wall. She begins to realize she's different from the others. At the end of the row she sees a knife lying on the ground. She picks it up and walks over to face the mirror. She begins to whittle pieces of herself away so that she can look like the others. The whittling visibly causes her pain but she becomes addicted to the immediate results she sees in the mirror. Eventually she whittles herself away so much that her limbs become like toothpicks and her legs start to shake under her. She falls down on one knee but her reflection remains standing and looks intact. However, the plus-sized mannequin is still not satisfied with her reflection and realizes that the only way she can truly be like the others is to cut off her head. She does so and her body crumbles to the ground. The camera then moves away from filming only the reflections of the figures in the room to actually showing them in reality and you can see they too are missing limbs and covered gashes and grime.

Here is a rough story reel of what was just described:
http://www.fx.clemson.edu/~atriple/860/storyreel1.mov

Here are some source images for the setting:

Cellmate

Slowly, we enter a dark, desolate cell where we see a prisoner sitting on the floor. He sits with his head tilted back against the wall and his eyes are fixed on the ceiling. As he blankly stares at the ceiling, he focuses on his only source of light, a small barred opening. His confinement is old, dark and putrid.

His attention is momentarily diverted to rattling of the slit underneath the heavy metal door. It is time for his daily meal. The tray is aggressively pushed through the opening, most of the contents wasting on the floor. The slit immediately closes. The look and smell of the food repulses him. A flashback of the last time he tried ensues.

Suddenly, he hears scratching and gnawing from behind the wall near his right hand. He slowly lowers his head to the floor and positions his face in the direction of the noises. He listens carefully as the sounds get louder. His curiosity grows as he sees small bits of rock break from the wall and fall to the floor. At that moment, he begins to see a tiny point of darkness which grows. The hole gets bigger and bigger as he now sees tiny sharp teeth that are viciously gnawing away at the wall. It doesn’t take long before he can see that it is a huge rat. The opening is now large enough for the rat to come through but, it doesn’t. It’s reluctant to venture beyond the opening. The prisoner notes the rat’s abrupt cessation of behavior, so he leans over and retrieves the food brought earlier and slides it closer to the opening. The rat is enticed and quickly leaves the opening. It comes out and begins to eat the food that the prisoner cannot bare to ingest.

The prisoner continues to curiously watch with excitement as the rat eats everything on the tray. It’s been a while since he’s seen or interacted with anyone or “any living thing”. After the rat finishes, it scurries back into the wall. The prisoner feels his time with the rat is over and begins to slip back into a state of despair. He sadly takes the tray and places it back through the slit underneath the door.

To the prisoner’s surprise, the rat soon returns with an old photograph in its mouth and places it near him. The rat looks up at him and disappears through the hole. The prisoner picks up the worn photo; it is a picture of a calm and soothing beach during a beautiful a sunset. The prisoner closes his eyes and his mind begins to wander. He clearly imagines himself at the beach. He can feel the cool breeze on his skin and the soft cold sand between his toes. He can hear the sounds of the seagulls, the rustling of the waves, and smell the fresh salt-water air. His feelings overtake him and he lets out a jovial laugh! It’s the best he has felt in a very long time. He spends what seems like hours in such a place, until once again time has won. He is then transported back to his familiar surroundings, but his mood has definitely changed for the better. The feelings of hopelessness have dissipated for the moment.

The following day, he hears the familiar sounds of the door slit opening and the tray sliding harshly in his direction, afterwards, the slit closes abruptly. The prisoner looks away in disgust. He would give anything to experience the feelings from the previous day – to be transported once again within the sunset while walking on the beach. And at that moment, the rat returns. This time, it brings him a tree branch covered in green foliage. The prisoner takes the branch and is suddenly transported to lush forest near a stream. It is so peaceful. Within the forest, he feels relaxed as he kneels beside the stream to dip his fingers in the cool water.

Days go by and this relationship continues until finally one day the rat brings him a key. The prisoner takes the key. He anticipates a sensation, but instead instinctively walks to the cell door, inserts the key, opens the door, and walks out

The camera fades back into the cell. We hear the lock turn on the door and the door opens. The guard walks in and sees an area where the prisoner has been dumping food, all of it rotten. The guard has found the source of the odor. It appears as though the food has been molding for days. He turns to another area of the cell and he sees the malnourished body of the prisoner, head leaning against the wall with a permanent smile.

Reference Photos :

(Scene from I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, 1932, the story of wrongly convicted James Allen)

Russian prison camp.

Ballad Of The Redneck Mech Cont'd- Designs

Samuroid Z- Color Version.

Samuroid Z

- Derivative of the classic Japanese robot Mazinger. It appears deceptively simplistic. Samuroid Z is largely smooth, rounded surfaces and mostly dark, dark blue with touches of white, red, and yellow. It has large Z-shaped wings that don’t work and can fire its fists off like rockets at opponents. The pilot sits inside the head. This mecha is particularly large, larger than all others.

The Ballad of The Redneck Mech

This here's a ballad. A ballad of a man. A kindly man, Grandpa Grampa.

What got his dog killed by a giant super robot powered by the fuel of Japanese dreams, Samuroid Z.

Now that there's a grounds for a fight.

...

This is the tale of a man who builds a John Deere styled mecha to avenge his squished loyal dog. The avenging shall be done against a number of anime-inspired parodies, all set to the a fine and jaunty tune.

The tune really should probably come first.

Other designs forthcoming, mecha and pilots.

On The Ride Home.

[Note: This is a very rough idea currently.]

Roughly Victorian settings, on a fairly well used train. The train is moving.

Only two players, one normal man in suitable dress of the era, another a pale man with white hair wearing a top hat that overshadows his face and a drastic overcoat.

Initially, the first man (henceforth known as X) is standing in the train car's walkway outside of the cabins, staring out a large window on a snowy expanse edged by a dark forest. The man is looking at his own reflection, at which point the viewpoint switches to his own. He is slowly moving his left hand towards his eye. It becomes apparent from the reflection that his left iris is clouding over.

An out-of-focus shadow of a man drifts past X in the background of his reflection.

X turns quickly on his heels and calls out, having seen no one on board the train for the entirety of his ride. He moves towards a cabin with an slightly open door. He glances in and sees no one, glances down the hall in both directions and sees no one, then decides to take a seat in the open compartment.

He takes a seat near another window, closes his eyes, then begins rubbing his closed left eye. We switch to his view again, slightly clouded on the left side, but unknown to us as everything is currently black. X opens his eyes to see a strange top-hatted man (THM) sitting across from him in a sudden way that should fuel nightmares. X asks the THM who the hell he is, which the THM leaves unanswered. The man never raises his head, leaving his a large portion of his face constantly in shadow.

The man quotes a number of Dante's Inferno verses and ends it with, "You've been riding for quite a while. Shouldn't you wonder about your destination?"

All the while, X's eyes are fogging over. He uses the last of his vision to look out the cabin window to see the hint of a massive struggling creature in the distance, frozen in a lake. X turns back to see no one in his vicinity. He starts to talk, but can only wheeze, as the train car is now choked with freezing air.

At this point in time, it should be obvious exactly what's going on... We switch to the present, with X on a bloody operating table, shown from a bird's eye view. A surgeon is leaning over him. We switch to X's eye view to see that the surgeon's face is shadowed, then the scene fades to white as we hear the heart monitor flat line noise.

SKYBok Sky Awesomes--a potential 860 project

After talking with Ashley and Kiel, here is another take on the story (some elements recycled from initial SKYBok post):

This is a story about a boy and his dreams and imagination. It begins with him looking through the newspaper (reading the comics) and coming across an add for the newest, most hyped basketball shoe on the market: the DPABok Sky Awesomes. He wants more than anything to have these shoes, but he just can't afford it--after all, $199 is a lot of money to a ten year old. So, dejected, he dons his old Convex Pro Stars (his decrepit, worn out basketball shoes), and heads to the playground.

He is playing ball by himself. His shots aren't really going in. He keeps playing when suddenly a strange creature descends upon the court from above. It is a giant shoe; it is a giant SKYBok Sky Awesome. The appearance of this giant shoe alters the court and surrounding environment into some kind of abstract otherworldly arena. The shoe appears sentient. It mocks the boy's inability to play basketball, and then challenges him to a game of one-on-one. An epic basketball battle then ensues. At first the shoe is dominant (it dribbles and shoots with its laces, using them like arms). It schools the boy by nailing several jumpers and layups with ease. The shoe arrogantly declares, "make it take it," and seems to be keeping possession indefinitely.

Finally, the boy looks into his heart and summons the will to play well. He gets possession of the ball from the shoe and skillfully out-maneuvers it with a series of incredible spin moves, cross-overs, jump steps, and head fakes.

The boy is able to create distance between he and the shoe. He pauses and takes a Jordan-esque leap over its head en route to a slam dunk. The shoe, unable to match the boy's superhuman jump, summons powers of his own to make the goal rise behind him. Undeterred, the boy continues his jump, rising into the sky along with the basketball goal.

The goal continues to rise higher and higher into the sky and the boy flies right behind (the backgrounds can get more and more abstract here). Finally, the boy catches up with the goal and delivers a backboard-shattering slam dunk. After hanging on the rim for a few moments of triumph, he releases himself and falls back down to earth, landing on the court in front of the shoe.

The shoe, realizing, he as been beaten, ascends back into the sky while the background shifts back into reality. The story ends at dusk, with the boy trying repeatedly (and failing) to dunk while the camera zooms out.

(the animatic below is based on an earlier version of the story)