animatic

once the characters were designed and finalized, they pretty much told me the story, not that its terribly complicated. there were a number of things that had to happen - i had to introduce ganesha (a four-armed, elphant-headed, beet-red, bipolar man), break the laws of physics so that the audience would be on board with everything that comes next, introduce ganesha to the needy who he then facilitates, and finally come to a screeching halt when he reaches the monk who also appears to be lacking something. everything has been building up to this moment between the monk and ganesha. the monk snaps his fingers at the end which signifies a reversal of roles. he looks up to acknowledge the audience and convey the message/moral of the story which is sort of a gift of knowledge.

everything leading up to the monk scene was unscripted. i think my notes read something like "ganesha jumps from scene to scene helping people." and i knew he would be snapping his fingers because that was a fun little device that everyone can relate to. because of the experimental quality of the film, i completely skipped the storyboard phase and jumped right into the animatic with some rough animation tests. much of the animatic was drawn in silhouette which gave me a quick preview of how each scene was panning out.

i'm not keen on reusing footage, but i thought it actually helped this short. like the soundtrack (which i'm still working on replacing) it gives the film this repetitive predictable quality "okay he's going to snap his fingers again and something crazy will happen..." most of the challenge came with timing everything. how short is too short? how many frames should it take ganesha to fly from here to there??