final project: a treatment

The Storyline

Aliens are showing humans images of war and violence so that they can use our fear as their flying saucer fuel. But the camera they use to capture all of their footage—a walking alien camera—is discovering more than violence and fear on earth; it’s discovering love, and friendship, and goodwill. The camera ends up falling in love with an inanimate earth camera and sacrifices itself to thwart the evil bastard alien plans.

The Process

For the most part, I will be using parenting for my final project. I’m going to start on character designs this week. I think I found some useful shortcuts for parenting while creating the bumper, and I really enjoyed watching those drawings come to life.

The images that the Aliens are showing abductees will be a found footage montage. The humans will be strapped to a chair with their eyelids held open—think A Clockwork Orange—watching this footage. I’m going to play around with adding filters to the footage, but I think the juxtaposition of animation and real video will have a nice look of its own.

I’m going to make this into a music video. For the track, I’m either going to make something in Garage Band, or use a particular song that I already have in mind.

I really want to try to get the background pulsing to the beat at certain points, so I’m going to mess around with keying the sound.

The Look

I think the characters will be black and white for the most part. I might add a little bit of color as the tension builds. The alien designs will be based off early sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The camera is going to look enough like any camera we’re used to, except it’s going to have some mechanical chicken legs to get around on.

The same found footage that the Aliens are showing their victims, will be used for a background as the camera makes his journey around earth. I’m also going to create a city street where the camera will discover the love of his life in a window display.

rotoscope

"But the blender was in tight with the Foreman."

bump it up