Sacks and Violence

Storyboard/Script

Opening scene: Title:-Sacks and Violence, scribbled in monochrome then inverted, fades in to a subtle water-colour washed green background, with 2 amoebae like sacks wibbling slightly, suddenly one opens its mouth and swallows the other. It looks rather pleased with itself, the camera pulls out showing how small and alone it is, this reveals a larger toothed creature bearing a resemblance to a whale crossed with a sack, this eats the ameobasack, we pull out again to see it flap its tail and land on a beach, in the background a sharksack misses catching the whale by a couple of frames, the whale sack looks relieved at having escaped by accident this fate and is stomped on by a larger sack. It looks in disgust at it's "foot" as if it has trodden in something unpleasant, and looks up off left, and sees something.

This sack then runs up a tree to see a monstrously huge sack pass by, the tree wobbles and we see a traditional long animation sack drop. Fade to black. Credits.

Concepts and possible storyboard thumbnails.

Originally I was going to have many sacks doing very unsacklike things such as fashion shows, and re-enacting various movies, e.g. Sackmare before Christmas, Reservoir Sacks, etc. as I wanted to do something with traditionally inanimate objects, and there is an old animation exercise called the sack drop, I wondered what were the origins of this peculiar tradition, so then I considered either sacks in the history of film, or film in the history of time, a timeline or something showing sacks through the ages of either film (Gertie the sackasaur, Citizen Sack, Gone with the Sack, Sack Wars, Sack in the Shell, The Sacktrix, Crouching Sack Hidden Sack etc) or the history of time, (One Million Sack BS with Sackel Welch, The Sack before time, 2000 and Sack and so on) but I thought the idea was far too complicated and a bit hackneyed. So I simplified it down. A lot. Right down to primordial sacks. I figured at some point in history, a sack dropped somewhere and it stuck in the primitive part of animators brains where it resides today in between bouncing balls, the flag wave, and nuking your director with a laser death ray. Yes.

The title is just a play on words, but is also descriptive.

Concept Art.

Wacom Tablet, mine came from Hong Kong for around £260, in this country it normally goes for at least £468.83.

Various computers, including Apple Macintosh G4 and Pentium II 233 (Windows 2000 professional for USB support) both running Photoshop 6 and Premiere 6/5.

Huge ATX tower case (£25 2nd hand several years ago)

PII 233 Genuine Intel Chip KP6-LA motherboard Asus (at least 5 years old)

128 MB ram (£48 this year)

8.4 gig hard drive (£80) several years ago, 850 MB hard drive,

Duel Boot between 95 and 2000

ATI all in wonder Pro graphics card, (TV in/out, teletext) 8Mb on board ram (£110 '95)

Voodoo2 3d card for the extra 8MB on board 3rd hand

17" Monitor (£124 this year)

100mb Zip drive (£30 computer fair this year)

54X CD-ROM (£40 last year)

Creative PCI 128 sound card (£50 years ago)

USB 12"x12" workable area wacom tablet 1024 levels of pressure detection, normal wacom stylus(mentioned earlier)

3Com 905B-tx 10/100 network card RJ45 output (£25 3/4 years ago) connected to 100MB/s 4 port hub.

Additional computer for writing CDs.

Rough total £1000.83 In reality probably about £5-600

One fully trained animator, versed in multiple techniques including cel painting, rough animation, cleanup, linetesting, trace and paint, U-matic usage, character design, lifedrawing, acrylic paint, pastel, pencil, watercolour, pen and ink, charcoal, chalk, photography, sculpture, ceramics, photomanipulation, Photoshop4,5&6, Quark, Premiere5&6, Real Media, Ulead Media Studio, Micro Angelo, X-sheet(PC linetester) word processing, win 3.1, win 95, win 2000, DPaint4.

9 hours per day, 5+ days of animation, min wage = £4.16/hour £187.20

TOTAL £700 as a rough estimate.

I went on the Internet to try and find a bunch of suitable sounds as I believed I’d be unable to make the sounds myself to a high enough quality (running footsteps for example) and also was unsure of what recording facilities I’d be able to use. Some of the sounds I made myself by spending a glorious sunny Saturday afternoon shaking a feather pillow about in front of a tie mic attached to the sound card of my PC, and others I just made silly noises for.

As of today (12 May 2001) I am unsure what music to try and apply onto this thing having spent all day attempting to get to grips with Premiere 5 putting strange pops and clicks into the soundeffects I have lovingly attempted to tack on. I would have used Premiere 6, but every time I tried to render up a version with sound, it would just crash, so I rendered up the visuals in 6 in win 2000 and the sound in 5 with win 95, as it appears fairly stable that way. This meant I had to completely redo the soundtrack from scratch as the ppj files are not interchangeable between versions.

I had thought the pops and clicks were due to some conflict with the way the wav files were recorded, so to remedy this, I converted all the relevant poppy and clicky ones to the format of the highest in the film, which was 16-bit, 22 kHz, stereo. This resulted in several of the files becoming corrupted and a couple of them improving, notably the splat at the end. I looked closer into Premiere 5 and removed the sound aberrations by changing the duration of the guilty parties.

Now I am trying to find some suitable music. Currently I am considering something from the Walter Carlos soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange, but I have tried looking through my other music, all for naught though as the visuals only last 40 seconds or so, and most pieces don’t get into their stride by that time. I have an idea that maybe the music should be a little like the title theme to the Dilbert animated series, or maybe Eek the Cat, something fast paced that builds at the beginning and drops at the end just as the sack is falling. I don’t know if I’ll find anything, and it may have to stand on it’s own, I think it needs music though.

On the 15^th May I started looking through some of the royalty free music in A258 intending for something fairly fast, possibly sound a little like some of Prodigy, but I ended up with a rather nice midi arranged piece for piano called "Short of Breath" which I think works rather well. I attempted to put this together at the college, but I figured I’d have more control and time to fiddle with it at home as another student was itching to get on the G4 I was using, I copied the music using Premiere 6 as an AIFF file and was unsure if my computer would be able to use this, converted it to a MOV file as I knew this would probably work, popped it on a zip disc and edited, converted and generally messed around with levels and volume at home. This was needed due to the fact the music was about 3 minutes long and the visuals are only about 40 seconds or so, so I pulled the volume down at a suitable juncture in the music. I think it works, but I would have preferred it to have it’s own timed music, like my previous film, where I animated and edited to a pre-set piece, or to write a piece specifically for it afterwards

I had planned on this being a lot simpler than "The Christmas Present" both in colour, plot, and characterisation, I wondered how much of a lack of detail on an in/animate object could I get away with but still make the final product recognisable? I also wanted a somewhat lively line quality to the work but with still the hint of water-colour in the colouring.

Originally there was no tilt shot following the sackdrop at the end, it was just a plain midshot. However, one afternoon, I had the idea that you could not actually do this shot in real life due to stuntpeople and camerabods not liking have solid objects hurled at them, and remembering the sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon where the young female lead jumps off the bridge and there is the moment where she just seems to hang/ fall forever made me consider having a silent sequence to build the tension: would the sack continue to drop or fly?

Colour tests.

Sackzilla walk cycle.

Tree model sheet of extremes, for when sackzilla walks past.

I think maybe the titles went on a little long, but I like the way the lettering came out and the way it inverts. I suppose I did this unconsciously as to have the black fade directly into the two sack-amoeba at the start seemed a little sudden, so I think this works rather nicely along with the music almost coming to a sub-conclusion, then continuing at full speed.

It seems a little unclear what is happening with the amoeba, the whale, and the shark, I think perhaps this is paced a little too fast before one can realise what is happening and almost put the brain into that speed, which kicks in around the slap of whale hitting shore, then the pace changes again for the disgusted flick and only catches up again with the run up to the tree. I think I should have given it more time to show fear about what was coming from off screen and give it a really good reason to run like mad up the tree, then we see the source of it’s fear. The timing of the sighs and pants of relief along with the monster sounds seem to work to show that our sack feels safe having rushed to possible safety. It could be construed as playing with the audiences conceptions and expectations to have three "kills" in fairly quick succession, then a near miss, followed by relief leading to the cause of death. I like the way the "hero" sack watches this huge mass pass and is almost taken with it due to the great draft of wind, but remains safe however I couldn’t work out the timing on when sackzilla would step and when the tree should squash and stretch as it was too complicated.

I would like to have had the tree squashing and stretching like this though with the small sack bumping up and down on top, so in that respect I was a little disappointed with the scene, however, I liked the way it folded and panted which originally was not in the storyboard. I wanted to give the impression that it was knackered after running all the way from the sea shore up the tree, but also mild concern about the terrible noises of something coming, so I think that worked.

Maybe the "hero" should have remained resting at the top of the tree longer, to relax more into sliding off and then had more of a worrying realisation of falling followed by panic, but this gels nicely into the next scene where it appears that it’s just slipped off and falls with more speed and no little fluster. I had a few problems with speed in that sequence which persuaded me to run some of the animation on 24 fps, as opposed to 12 which most of the rest of the film is in and I think it works well because of it. The flypast sequence which wasn’t in the original storyboard works well too, normally with this kind of shot there is a cut of some kind halfway down, so I thought I’d experiment to see if just be changing the way animation moved I could simulate a fast camera move. In that way I feel it was highly successful and also built up the tension well to continue to the next scene of ultimate and inevitable death, which is maybe a little foreseen by the fact there is a shadow underneath which gets larger the closer the "hero" falls. It fades out to white then inverts to black so the whole thing is intended to possibly run as a cycle, which in a way it is: the cycle of evolution, life, death and the inevitability that there is always a bigger "sack" out to get you, either by accident, by malice or even just for survival.

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