GHOST STORY PITCH
Acorn in the middle of the road. A squirrel sees it and runs out to grab it. A car zooms through, and when it passes, the squirrel is still standing there, but in ghost form. He tries to grab the nut, but can't. As he struggles, another car zooms past and smashes the acorn. Now he has a ghost acorn and is happy.
He gets excited and starts throwing other random objects into the road, making a bunch of ghost objects. Time passes and this game starts to bore him. Other creatures go by and he tries to interact, but they can't see him. He now has all of these possessions but no friends, so he tries to build a friend out of his objects, but it doesn't work.
He has a girlfriend and goes in search of her. He discovers another male squirrel flirting with her and gets really jealous. He decides to get her killed somehow so that he can have her forever and the other squirrel can't get to her. He is watching all this from the other side of the road when he sees her reject the other squirrel and turn away. He sees this and now feels really bad about thinking about killing her.
As she crosses the road, he sees a car coming directly for her and now has a dilemma. Should he let the car hit her and let her die, or should she try to save her? He panics as the car gets closer and closer, and then finally he jumps into the car and possesses the driver to swerve and miss her, saving her life. She keeps going, and he sadly watches her scamper away. As he turns to go, another car zooms by in the other lane where she was crossing, and he turns to find her ghost now standing there after the car passes. Now they can be together! Hooray!
THE END
4 comments:
I really did think this was cute, and I'm excited to start doodling up some ideas for it. I agree, however, with the concerns that having squirrels will smack way too much of Scratt, so I thought I'd throw out some alternate animals we could play with, for development's sake:
Armadillos - they're funny looking and don't have hair, and could be fun to design.
Ferrets - my personal favorite so far... are known to steal and hoard things, so it'd make sense for him to have all these random things to ghostify. That and the weasel family has such cool body shapes that could have great gestures in animation.
Foxes - Also have a reputation for being sly and sneaky, if not exactly hoarders.
Raccoons - Do have a "bandit" reputation, but they've been done recently, in Over The Hedge. If we chose to do raccoons, they'd have to be VERY different in design from RJ or Meeko.
And since we're wary of doing fur, we'll have to find a way to get the environments to work so the animals won't look weird without. Check out "Burning Safari" again, for example. The chimp/baboon thing doesn't have fur at all. It's definitely possible.
Birds - Have very snappy movements and could be fun to try. Seagulls were done in Finding Nemo, but there's reason we couldn't do it differently. Ravens are another that could work. The main worry I have here is that birds have a lot of fun animation potential, but they would be hard to rig, hard to animate (especially flight), and we'd probably need feathers, which I don't expect anyone wants to deal with.
Well, that's my rambling on the subject, feel free to argue or add or whatever. Discussion is what's going to get this going, as y'all know.
I hate to post again and feel like some kinda eager beaver, but...
If he can't pick up the acorn/whatever, how can he start throwing things into the road? I know that story development isn't quite the issue yet, but something I noticed.
Great point Rachel! Dave and Jeremy pointed this out to me. It's a serious issue considering the first half of the story depends on it. Plus, I see 2 different stories in Jenny's pitch. 1) The animal dies and is lonely and his only purpose in life is trying to turn real things into ghost objects so he can use them and 2) an animal dies and goes back to communicate with his girlfriend and the subsequent events that follows (as stated in the pitch). I think these two ideas cannot both be told effectively in 3 minutes. I will comment more soon.
For some reason I have also had Burning Safari in my head when imagining the look of Jenny's story. I really hope some people have some Burning Safari-ish character designs on Wednesday. I won't even attempt to draw them because I'd probably put people off with my drawings :)
My wife also brought up the fact that he can't pick up things to smash them if he can't pick up the acorn, but I so loved the image of him making an effigy of a squirrel (or whatever) because he is lonely. In fact, that first part of the story was definitely my favorite part. The second half with the girlfriend kind of loses me.
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