Treatment:
My 1 minute animation will be about a boy named Nicholas who takes his life on earth for granted. He is a well privileged boy, but spends all of his time with his dog in his tree fort looking up at the night sky through a telescope. He looks out of the tree fort window and the hills of the outside world are grey and barren. He has a rocket ship waiting for him whenever he's decided he doesn't want to live on earth any longer. After this plot is established, conceptually in the first 15 seconds or so, Nicholas will leave his dog and launch his rocket ship into space. The rocket ship will conveniently land on an unknown planet. Waiting for him on the desolate planet is a book of dreams. Opening the book will start a new 30 to 40 second collage of words, images, and philosophical insights. I will borrow and make references to philosophers and musicians that have said and wrote powerful messages and thoughts. As these images are haphazardly thrown around in and out of focus and appearance on the actual pages themselves, there will be original music playing that I will record myself with my guitar. If the recording of my original music does not turn out to be satisfactory, I will use GarageBand to create a mix of sounds from multiple songs. Regardless of either technique, the music will be abstract to compliment the montage of thematic words and images. Some of the music will be played backwards, which will be done using various recording techniques that I have the capability to do. The end of the book will give Nicholas a blatant wake-up call that he was wrong to overlook his life on earth. He will then fly back to his tree fort to find his dog still waiting for him like a loyal friend.
The conceptual process:
I realize after writing the basic pitch for the story, there are multiple ways to create this animation. I will convey the story through the cueing of images and perhaps a first person narrative from Nicholas if the visual storytelling/dialogue (of the boy rhetorically talking to his dog) isn't strong enough. I think the best way to accomplish the telling of this story will be to use Adobe Photoshop and After Effects for pretty much everything. I will do a combination of altering previously created images and drawing my own images on Photoshop. I will then export those images into After Effects, in which all of the movement and animation will take place. I will have a few shots of the night sky through point of view shots of Nicholas looking through the telescope. For the most part, the backgrounds of all the scenes will be stationary; for the shots of the night sky I might play around with the stars and planets to make the perspective look dreamlike. I will create a sort of iris that will make it look like the viewer is looking through a telescope view. The most movement in the projects entirety will take place during the sequence of reading the book of dreams from Nicholas's perspective. I will “cut” text and words from various sources that I find online, in advertisements, magazines, books, etc. For text from actual sources such as books and magazines, I will have to obviously scan the images into the computer and alter them using Photoshop.
