Pel and Alexander

 

So it's the end of February and what have I accomplished? Well, a lot actually. I started by writing down 10 ideas on a sheet of paper. They were almost all jokes (of course). One was "Two archeologist mice unearth an alien sphere that tries to sell them time shares". Some were just simple ideas like "A fire knight falls in love with an ice dragon". I showed the list to Maria and we whittled it down to three. I then elaborated on them a little bit. One of the ideas, the one I decided to go with was "A village trains an adventurer to overcome the local dungeon/labyrinth only to find the treasure is a mirror." I explained that the dungeoneering would be a montage of all the famous movie stuff as parody and that sold it to her. 

As I started to develop this idea I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a guy went through a bunch of riddle chambers and the Minotaur at the end just had his collection of mirrors that he was obsessed with? Normally the mirror would be 'The magic is in you' which we've seen in Kung Fu Panda and that Matrix Southpark parody of Wal-Mart. But I thought what if the Minotaur really really loved mirrors and there was no lesson at the end? That would be funny, right?

So I started to write the script. I pictured an old German style house cottage on a hill. It would be sunset and the husband would be coming home. I literally wrote "She was in the cabin making...." and I stopped. Why does she have to be making something? It's already sexist.

So I changed it to "She was reading by the window". But then it dawned on me, what if it's a he? What if it's a gay couple? The partner comes home because his job is gone. This gives the guy reading at the window, Pel, an excuse to pursue the labyrinth cave thing he found a little while ago. The partner, down to earth realist Alexander is sick of hearing about it and isn't in the mood now that they have no income.

The beginning is great! Very honest, the stakes are high. But then I realized, this can't just end with a joke about mirrors. This needs to be a bit more emotional. It ends with a life lesson (sorry) but I think it's cute and still manages to be overall a twist I don't think I've seen before. There's even 'The lie the character believes' so there's a character arc!

So with the script finished middle of last month, I hired actual voice actors for Alexander and Pel and Maria is the Minotaur guardian. This February I worked on getting the entire animatic done. Maria re-worked the Minotaur design (mine was my typical clunky crap). So my plan is March I'm going to ZBrush, 3D print and build the puppets! 

Wish me luck!