Reworked Storyboard

Here we have our storyboard. However this version is devoid of the art style that we have in mind. It was purely so we could work out the camera ad action taking place within our story. The animatic will help better explain the motions within our story and eventually Pre-viz will leave no question as to the points of view and camera actions we would like!

The mish-mash of scenes and points of view towards the end are a series of close ups in mind that show the bunker to be just that, a bunker. They will be a collection of drawn out zoom's and Ken-Burns shots before finally the little protagonist is focused upon... alone awaiting the dark.

Idea 4- Dolls in the Dark

Previously Meg and I here at Grumpy Moose had decided to try and run with the following idea for our Atomic era inspired animation.

'A day in the life of a dolly housewife. The husband is waved off to work with his lunch. The daughter helps out cleaning the house and making apple pie. The dolls world flickers away to reveal the reality. A little girl sits utterly alone in a bomb shelter playing with the dolls. Over the sounds of a radio playing music, the room shakes with what sounds like a bomb impacting.'

In our brainstorming session over the idea and how it would work I drew up a storyboard, which in the space of a few hours completely evolved again. However all the same we wanted to record its progress. In the images below, the main figure is the housewife doll until reality is exposed and the dolls world is seen to be the little girls fantasy.

The storyboard changed as we realised this was the fantasy of a young girl who is now very alone in a bunker. And her fantasy would be as biased to her dreams as possible. Therefore it would make it more likely that the 'daughter' dolly character would be another version of herself. And like any small child would love to spend time with her mother, learning how to be a good housewife for her future husband.   So with this in mind we devised a script, building on this newly evolved idea.

Dolls in the Dark- Initial Script

Initial Idea

Our first solid idea (after many, many nonfunctional ones) was to look at the dichotomy inherent in the Cold War era - the dichotomy of hope and fear, of grand opportunities and ever-looming danger. With the success of the Manhattan Project, the world was looking at a new age of prosperity ushered in by nuclear power. The USA in particular was already booming from the Second World War, and the overall standard of living there was on the rise. This was evidenced in the ever-increasing amount of travel, including international travel by aeroplane. It was this that caught our interest, and we wanted to look at the slight irony of how wartime advances in aeronautics had benefitted civilian life, and the dark purpose those vehicles still carried out even after the war was over.

Initial Unscripted Storyboard (Note: Reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right)

The intention (which is a little hard to read, especially as I never got around to finishing this) was to depict a plane passing over a tropical island, and all the opulent holidaymakers that entails. It would then pass towards a series of coral islands, and the camera would 'detach' from the plane to reveal that it was a B-29 Supercarrier bomber, dropping the first atomic bomb on Bikini Atoll.

We scrapped this idea as it was lacking in any actual story content, and its commentary wasn't entirely clear.