Animated Narratives Week 5

By Harry Hughes

With this week's theme being character design, I decided it would be appropriate to expand on some of the characters I had developed for my week 4 project. This was the first time I haven't used the premises as a prompt. I think I felt like I was starting to develop something interesting in that story of Spike and Bulldog and wanted to see what more I could get out of it. 

I had sort of sensed that there wasn't enough going on in the story with these characters, so it felt like a weird relief to see that this week's reading by Syd Field was to do with developing a script that had become too boring and characters that were too thin.

First up in order to flesh out Spike and Bulldog I tried to come up with critical moments from their pasts which I think could still be affecting them. I figured that if Bulldog had seen his parents killed by porcupines, then that would set him on a path where porcupines where his sworn enemy.

I then decided I wanted there to be a star bunny, rather than them just appearing as a faceless bunch in my script. I came up with a star, young bunny named LOTHLO, and made it so he was the one who gets sent out and first encounters Spike, and that he will also lead the charge of bunnies at the end. Finally I attempted another Field technique to develop my understanding of the relationship between Spike and Bulldog- where they met, how long ago, and what their initial feelings were for each other. This helped me to further develop both of these characters individually (now I knew Bulldog had been left to fend for himself for years after his parents were murdered) and a bit more about what they each thought they stood to gain from an alliance between the two of them. In the original draft Spike and Bulldog were dating, but the more I thought about developing this, the more uncomfortable I felt about inter-species love, so their relationship became a mutually beneficial "alliance" and the idea of love was off the table.

The script I made was for the scene that seems most pivotal at this early stage in development. Up to this point the audience has only followed the bunnies and known the facts that the bunnies have known, which is really only that several bunnies have gone missing. When Lothlo meets and is ambushed by Spike, the audience thinks for a while that Spike will be the main villain, but in this scene, Lothlo learns of the alliance between the bulldogs and the porcupines.

Oh, this script has major issues to do with cliché. I do enjoy writing dialogue, but the script seems very troubled. I like the way I've built a tiered and well-structured story from the simple premise "a porcupine wants to make friends with a fluffy bunny", and there are some vaguely interesting characters, but Spike- who was initially my main character- is still a little thin, and frankly I'm a bit weirded out by the fact that I keep making projects about animals!