First Weeks of Development

Good day!

These past few weeks I have been working on the development of my movie. I started off by re-writing my story "Queues", which I chose as my short movie.

After re-writing it, I decided to pitch it to a couple of friends, just to see if there was any major flaws in the story plot, as well as to test how would people understand it. Everyone I pitched it to understood the story and found it funny, but there was a major issue that I kept being asked about: "if your character goes to the tax office why doesn´t he take a number and stands in line like it happens in real life?".

To be honest, when I wrote the story, I didn´t feel like I had to explain why he doesn´t take a number and wait, however after all the comments about it, I felt I probably should find a way of explaining the reason for that. And it had to be a very short explanation time-wise.

With that in mind, I kept thinking how to solve this, and came up with this idea: What if my character, when he goes inside the tax office building, goes for the ticket and sees a notice about the ticket machine being broken, and indicating that he has to wait in line? This simple change made me also have a very good conflict introduction in my story. The best part is that, according to my calculations, this shot takes around 7 to 10 seconds.

I will explain why. After having the previous idea, I also figured out that by adding a simple scene, in which my character enters the building, goes for the ticket machine, sees the sign (all of this without the camera revealing what is happening inside the building towards the counter), and then he just glances to his left, turns back to the ticket machine, and then by glancing quickly again towards the counter, with a very scared and worried expression, the camera pans out and reveals the enormous queues that will lead to the story of the movie. This brings a very strong and interesting conflict discovery to my story.

At the same time I have been working in my main character, and the Art direction of my movie. I want him to look a bit goofy, yet serious enough so that he doesn´t seem like the kind of person that gets angry. This will allow me to better establish and strengthen the message of the movie, even the calmest person can get very angry when not respected by other people.

At this point I made a few sketches, and designed the looks for my character. The rest of the story elements will be in the same style as the following colored picture of my character.

 

I have also done some sketches and I am almost completing my storyboard which I will post soon.

Cheers!