Pre-Production Project

This year I have chosen to do the Pre-Production option, we have been given random cards with characters, settings, genres and styles and we have to combine the things on our cards to make an idea for an animation. I got "Prison Guard", "Nail Salon", "Winsor McCay" and "Pre School" (we were allowed to flip one card and "pre school" was changed to "dark comedy").

Winsor McCay was a comic illustrator in the early 1900's and one of the first people to bring animation to the public audience with his animated character "Gertie the Dinosaur". I studied his style and I found I was most interested in his earlier drawings of "Nemo the Clown", these drawings were in black and white and were drawn with a bold black outline.

For my story I decided it would work best as a T.V. show about a nail salon run by prisoners (I got the idea from a T.V. show where Gordon Ramsay taught prisoners to cook). As research I watched a couple of documentaries about American prisons which are run by private companies and full of tattooed gang members. One of the documentaries featured an overweight, Texan prison guard who addressed the prisoners as "Boy", I thought he would be a really entertaining cartoon character so I did a few drawings of him;

I liked the idea of including this character but I didn't think it would really suit his character to have him starting a nail salon so I designed a second prison guard. This prison guard is called Daryl and he's the prison therapist, he believes that the prisoners are just misunderstood and he's far too patient with them. I thought that having two completely opposite characters running the prison would be entertaining and could be the source of a lot of the comedy.

I then drew some designs for prisoners;

As I watched the prison documentaries I couldn't help but think that they only seemed to focus on the thuggish, violent criminals with tattoos from under-privileged backgrounds so I thought I should also include some other types of criminals. The drawing below is of a pair of Wall Street bankers who are in prison for insider trading.

My current plot line is that the prison is out of money and the prisoners keep fighting and rioting so in an attempt to raise money and soften the prisoners the hippie warden tries to get them to open a nail salon. In every episode the bankers come up with crazy scheme to escape and the hippie warden faces some sort of obstacle, at the end of each episode the bakers escape plan fails and they get beaten up by the violent criminals.