This week, I made my full rough animatic. My 2D animated thesis film, Scales--- "An employee at a dystopian fishery searches for a life outside of the corporate machine, only to find that there is no such thing."
At least, this is the logline that I'm sticking with. I'm a little late to the game getting around to making a blog for this thing. Scales (a temporary title) is a short story set in a science fiction world that's been in the back of my mind for the last few years.
Originally, this science fiction world was meant to be the setting for a Gone With the Wind style story that followed the heiress of a wealthy family being thrust into a position of authority at her family's business. The business in question? Creating mutated/biological engineered fish to be sold as food for the hungry masses. After people started stealing the fish, the wealthy heiress would punish them by turning them into fish and reselling them at an escalated price to the wealthy class who wanted to try the delicacy of a hybrid fish/human. The story ends with the poor rising up and literally eating the rich-- without going through the cumbersome process of mixing their DNA with fish first.
THAT^ was basically the original story that I first muttered quietly in Thesis Seminar.
Over the course of weeks in seminar, this version of "Scales" began to mutate just like the aquatic creatures it featured. I decided that I wanted the story to be about art rather than class and so I changed the narrative to be about a girl named Tav who befriends the last un-engineered fish (or the last piece of non-ai-art as the metaphor went).
The fish in this version symbolized Tav's artistic journey and evolved not through corporal intervention, but through Tav's own evolution as an artist. This version of the story was messy and had a treatment that estimated it to ring in at around 20 minutes long-- an absurd length for one academic year's production. Nevertheless, the jury of fellas I pitched this idea to approved me. My advisor, Brian, cautioned me to take the summer and really hammer out the beats of the story. He also suggested that I try to not mix metaphors in future drafts of the tale. Barely listening, I grabbed my big APPROVED sticker and raced off into the summer of 2024.
As summer came to a close, I admit was stressed. I didn't really know how to improve my original idea and had no clue how I was going to condense it. Then one night, while I was drinking a bottle --er, glass of red wine, it hit me. SHE evolves into the fish. SHE'S the art. SHE gets ripped a part by the corporate machine. Doi!
And all at once, Scales had evolved from the gruesome eat the rich narrative to the old reliable sci-fi premise of machines replacing humanity. The twist on this tried and true cliche of the science fiction genre is that this time, the machines are ripping humanity a part to create ai art. I couldn't wait to tell Brian all about my honed plan. Of course, he would see that it was brilliant and that there was no where for him to poke holes in it.
And obviously I was wrong. My story still wasn't as clear as it could be. Silly me, I had to imagine what my character wanted and how she was going to get there. She was too reactionary. Why wasn't she being proactive? What was her personality? Are the other fish in the reservoir other mutated employees? Could she get in trouble for wandering off? Would I care if people didn't get my delicious metaphors?
I will say, that all of Brian's questions were both inspiring and infuriating. He was asking the same questions that I ask other people in writing classes. For some reason, I got so lost in the proverbial seaweed, I didn't even realize I still didn't have a simple story.
As our meetings continued into September, I found myself coming up with good answers for some of the questions and confidently saying "That doesn't matter" or "That isn't the point" to others. After weeks and weeks of me staring at a storyboard pro project, I somehow created something that felt...close? And get this, Brian watched it. And he paused it at every minute and asked me questions and suggested things that needed to be improved. And then he finished it.
And he said he was confident that it could work.
And it was one of the happiest days of my fall semester.
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