Beginning The Boer

On Friday I found out my 3rd year film idea has been picked to be developed into an animatic so this blog post will explain the project. 

The idea is an amalgamation of all the things I want to put in a film. This could be the only chance I get to make an animated short and I want to make something which reflects my style and sense of humour. I only have 3/4 minutes so I'm not trying to make a bold statement or preach anything, I just want to make a solid, funny animation which will be fun to watch and which gets completed in time.

At the end of the last academic year I attended an idea generating workshop in which our pre-production tutors gave us a random image or saying, we then had an hour to develop it into a pitch. My image was of a bulky cartoon man carrying vegetables across a flat, orange plain towards the horizon. I was immediately reminded of the time I stayed on a friends farm in South Africa 2 years ago because the landscapes were similar. One of the things which I remembered from the farm visit was the vast, open spaces, the feeling of isolation and the silence. I thought the setting would be perfect for exaggerated tension and I was imagining a couple trapped on a farm together sitting in silence with nothing to say. I imagined the farmer as the strong, stubborn, silent type and the wife being small and timid and I could see them sitting with nothing of interest to say to each other, depressed with their mundane lives. 
I then needed some sort of catalyst so I decided that the farmer finds a baby made of vegetables, he raises it as his own but it eats other vegetables. It eats all vegetables and he has to kill it but then finds out his wife is pregnant so everything works out ok. 
The feedback from my tutors was generally positive so I carried on developing it and replaced the vegetable baby with a monster sheep (I like designing monsters). I then pitched it to Louis Cook from Aardman at a workshop the following week. I found that when I was pitching it the thing which people seemed to like the most was the idea of a couple that hates each other but were stuck on this farm. I had an idea for a scene where the farmer and his wife are sitting opposite each other and he's getting angrier and angrier over the way she breathes and that seemed to be the part which everyone enjoyed hearing about the most. 
The farmer's relationship with the sheep evolved from it being a surrogate child to a friend that he can spend time with as the idea developed. Everyone kept suggesting that the farmer and the sheep were getting it on but I was reluctant to follow that route as I thought it was too obvious and I didn't want to change the story for cheap laughs. I thought of it more as one of those weird habits which snowballs into a huge problem (like a hoarder living in a house full of rubbish or an obese person who can't stop eating). There's something strangely satisfying about secretly doing something which other people frown up on (like cooking meth in a camper van in the desert, fighting crime in tights, pretending to choke in restaurants or getting up at ungodly hours to spray paint graffiti).

Here's the synopsis from the pitch document; 

    Our story is a Ren and Stimpy style 2D animation set on the desolate plains of South Africa.

A farmer is in a stagnant marriage to a woman who is constantly drunk. His wife is constantly smoking which particularly annoys him and causes him to grind his teeth in anger.

The farmer finds a deformed sheep amongst his flock and he becomes infatuated with it, they become best friends and start spending all their time together as a distraction from his loveless marriage. The deformed sheep is carnivorous and the farmer becomes obsessed with feeding it, as he runs out of food he starts aggressively slaughtering his livestock to feed the monster’s appetite for meat. The sheep balloons into a giant eating machine that constantly demands food and the bloodshed begins to take its toll on the farmer.

The farmer’s alcoholic wife begins to notice that her husband has changed so one night she investigates the barn containing the giant monster sheep (who is now too large to move).

The farmer finds his wife struggling to stay alive in the translucent stomach of the monster. Fearing prison he runs to get his chainsaw so he can save his wife but he cannot bring himself to kill the sheep he loves.

The last scene shows the farmer lying in the sheep’s wool smoking a cigarette. He offers it to the monster sheep who smokes it in the same manner as his wife, the farmer begins grinding his teeth. The cycle begins again!

I spent the summer trying to work my head around this dark, psychological thriller which would combine elements of David Croenenberg and Chuck Palanhiuk (see the gloomy pictures in the previous blog post). I was getting really frustrated and the whole thing felt like a horrible chore.

Then I went to Bournemouth Visual Effects (BFX) festival and I was blown away by the incredibly skilled professionals' presentations. One presentation really inspired me; Philip Hunt from Studio AKA showed us some of their productions and the development process. I realised that I needed to simplify my characters and be less literal with my drawing, concentrating more on creating a bold visual style as well as make my animations less depressing and bleak.

So about two weeks before the pitches I completely changed the style of the animation into a Ren and Stimpy/Spongebob Squarepants style pose-to-pose. I'm now really excited about the animation and I think it'll be a much more entertaining. The style suits the story better and is lot more expressive and funny.