MUD & METAL
January 7, 2006

I.  CONCEPT
Two characters:  A robot and a human.  The puppets are 12" - 14" tall.  Very abstract forms:  one made of boxes and cubes, the other one mummy-like.  Contrasting textures:  smooth finish, vs. crumbly concrete -- playing off the idea that humans were shaped from clay.  A plain white backdrop for their environment (like in "THX 1138").  Have dialogue appear as animated writing.  Two to three minutes in length.

Here is the germ idea I'm starting from.  (Taken from "Block World" doc written on 01.05.06.)

#004  THIRD PICK
Robots.  Put a small wooden cube on top of a more rectangular block to imply person (inspired by the sculpture "Allotment II" by Antony Gormley).  Do something inspired by Karel Capek's original robot story, "R.U.R".  "They live among us."  Have humans represented by balls of Sculpey.  ...Although, I don't really want to work with balls of Sculpey -- it tends to roll out into a cylinder as you move it around.  Instead, I could rough out some human forms from insulation foam, cover them with clay...  Or cement.  That would chew up some time -- but it would be a great textural contrast.  And I like the biblical reference:  Adam = adamah = earth.  The people would move in arcs, the robots would move in straight lines, turning in place -- another good visual contrast.  I also like the idea of letting myself do a genre piece; sci fi being a love that I haven't juxtaposed with stopmo yet.  There's some good opportunities for shots that have multiple planes:  foreground, midground, background.  ...But I'm thinking a little too visually; let's get back to story.  "They live among us."  "We trust them."  Maybe it turns out to be the voice of the robots...  "We are exploited."  Intersperse curvilinear writing with shots of the robots moving around between the still, statuesque (that could be a problem) people.  End with an incident where the human is beating a robot.  End on:  "We want our freedom."  ...The human's arm could be a problem -- that requires an armature -- it takes me out of the realm of just animating objects.

II.  NEW STORY IDEAS

#001
Overarching structure...  Three vignettes.  Each one preceded by a 3D spinning number.  The title, "Mud & Metal" written on a plate of glass in front of the characters using grease pencil (forcing the background to be out of focus).  End credits "by Sven" written on my actual hand, shot in real time instead of animated.  Maybe "by Sven" on one side of the hand, "2006" when I turn the hand over and show the palm...  Just to have a smidge of live action in this project.

#002
Have the robot's voice be in curly cursive writing, and the human's be in block letters, so you can mess with people's expectations -- keep things ambiguous for a few lines before revealing that it's actually the robot with the more poetic soul.  This "surprise!" gimmick could probably constitute the first vignette.  ...I'm liking the contrasts I've got going on:  human / robot, shiny / rough, cursive / block letters...  A more subtle one here is that including a robot inherently implies the future -- but I'm shooting on Super8 stock, which is a retro media.  ...I could begin with just the robot's voice -- reveal the block letter voice in the second vignette.  The narrator voice could begin by addressing the differences between "us" and "them" -- or it could talk about the relationship between "me" and "him".  Talking about us/them means speaking about the implied world that the characters live in, and would contextualize them in a historical period.  If I only go into "me" and "him", there's no sense of an outside world -- there's a bubble of fantasy where these two characters exist, and we don't necessarily assume that there *are* any other characters in the universe.  The characters remain self-contained -- which might even prevent the audience from reading a "robots" and "humans" narrative into what they're seeing -- that one character is rectangular and the other is mud-like would be seen as soul-made-manifest.  I'm pretty sure I want to imply the human-robot relationship...  Although I'm not sure I actually want to use the word "robot".  Using "metal" in the title will help people make the leap somewhat.  And if I say something about "they made us", I think the audience can put 2 and 2 together.

#003
Final vignette:  the human dies.  He is lying on the ground and the robot contemplates the meaning of this.  It could be that he doesn't understand the difference between sleep and death at first.  I could show the decomposition of the human by actually breaking down the puppet (a rather Svankmajer / Brothers Quay tactic).  Goes against my archivist nature; and if there's any kind of armature, it might not look too good.  Or, I could have dirt pile up on top of the body until it's a burial mound.  ...If I were going to break the puppet, I could have the robot do it -- uh, if he had arms, that is.  A cool line to juxtapose with the human death:  "metal immortal."  ...Which raises the question:  what is this story really about?  I mean, it's OK to just throw together a few random vignettes (like in the film "Robot Stories") -- but if I'm using such abstracted forms, then I'm sort of volunteering myself into the realm of metaphor.  Which is fine -- I like the "artsy", and don't really have much patience for gags on their own.  ...So, at the metaphor level, we've got a brief firefly existence, and the potentially immortal 'bot.  Or maybe the bot's not immortal -- perhaps he pines "who will fix me?"  "We depend upon each other, you and I -- what am I if alone?"  Easily becomes too preachy, like an uppity comic book.  But I like the pining idea -- anything that deals with relational emotion.

#004
Middle vignette:  Address the fact that we're talking about metaphor head-on; pomo-style, like in "Scream" and "The Faculty".  What does it mean to create a robot?  It is a surrogate for childbirth (sorta like animation itself); it's immortality by proxy; it's manifesting that part of ourselves that wants to be perfect, mechanical, logical...  One could view a robot as a form of self-hate; if the robot is all that we long to be, then perhaps there's a subconscious sense of being flawed:  being mortal, farting, hungry, moody, confused.  It could be a good (and sweet) gag for the robot to say, "I wish I could fart."  Gag-wise, this would have to be preceded by the human spouting off about the robot's perfection.

#005
...Back to the pomo-concept:  The robot could say "I'm a metaphor.  I'm the ideal you."  "You made me to be the ideal you."  Well, to the best of the inventor's ability.  I could also go with any of the other meanings I suggested before:  "I'm your surrogate child, right?"  Or:  "So, living out your desire to live forever through me, huh?"  Gag:  "Wouldn't it have been easier to push me into sports?"  ...Another big robots-as-metaphor place I could go to would be the "where's the line between man and machine?" question.  "Ghost in the Shell 2" did a pretty good job of exploring that, showing people with prosthetics, robots made into "uncanny valley" sex dolls, AI, and people who seem almost programmed because of how habit-based their lives are.  ...I don't think I want to go down that cyborg path on this project.  It's kinda the realm of cyberpunk, which often boils down to (a) "being revved up is so sexy!", (b) "look at how soulless we *humans* are", or (c) "doesn't matter if you like machines or not -- we're already totally intertwined, you glasses-wearing, telephone-using fool."  I'd like some quality of sweetness in this short, so I'll probably work the robots-as-idealized-self angle -- with the robot kindly pondering the ways in which the inventor's neuroses aren't really resolved by wish-fulfillment (the birth of the bot).

#006
Another angle I'm not going to choose.  So, typically in robot stories, you have the folks who invent the robot, who think that their existence is a good idea -- and you have the folks who didn't invent the bots, who are in some way scared of them.  I'm not interested in the robots-as-threat angle.  In its most base form, the robot-monster story is just about slaying another inscrutable dragon.  The more intimate robot story is a parable about slavery:  we created these metal slaves -- what if they rise up against us?  (And steal our women? --Just like in "Birth of a Nation", but with silver instead of black skin.)  Flipside of the slavery angle is a discussion of "human rights" for robots -- perhaps best exemplified by that "Star Trek:  The Next Generation" episode where Picard has to argue before a court that Data is a person, and therefore must not be dissembled.  ...Is the human in this story the actual inventor-parent of the bot?  I'm not sure.  I think the world I want to explore is one where robots are not new -- they're simply part of the social fabric.  Are they servants?  In a caste system?  Maybe not.  I'm terribly fond of Stanislaw Lem's robot stories, where humans have disappeared, and all you have are the robots -- living out their lives, unaware that there ever were organic progenitors.  So:  Let's not go that far into the future; instead, let's delve into this unexplored (?) middle ground where robots are neither slaves nor the inheritors of the Earth -- they're equals with humans, and there's no serious antagonism between the groups.  A truly "multi-cultural" society.  ...This changes the flavor of exploring differences between bots & bods.  It's more like looking at the subtleties of male-female relationships, than at the gross differences between species.

#007
What if the relationship between the hum and the bot is essentially that of partners?  It's not master-slave, it's not buddy-film chums, it's not bickering spouses -- but it's intimate and intertwined.  A relationship that isn't rocky; there's no instability or threat of the two breaking up...  The two are different, but aren't rudely inconsiderate; they try to think of each others' feelings, but sometimes forget that they're not actually the same.  Maybe whenever a hum is born, they get paired up with a machine counterpart -- it's "the buddy system".  You don't get to order the bots around, because society has learned that slipping into the "master" role warps one's character.  However, it's been recognized that people do better when they're not left alone; having a dog or cat helps cure depression -- but this is even better.  Maybe human society has reached a plateau in population growth, and may be the bot production plants broke down centuries -- so that there's a stable ratio of bots to humans.  (A story of supply and demand dynamics, there being more bots or more humans -- also not where I want to go.)  Maybe the creation of a bot each time a person is born is so automated that humans don't even think about where bots come from anymore.  Maybe humans are created in vats, right along side the machines that manufacture bots -- so the equality of procreation is truly profound.  Maybe this isn't a future centuries away -- maybe it's thousands of years away, so many previous ways of life have been forgotten (and discovering the true history, like in "Planet of the Apes", isn't the goal of the story).  Maybe the reason for the human-machine pairing is like the need for glasses:  the glasses complete a person.  The robot-human pairing is like two halves of a soul; and as such, I can explore them in that way -- the part of the self that is interested in programming daily agendas -- and the part of the self that is interested in how things feel.  And, just to throw in a twist, it's humans who are more prone to emotionless days -- it's the robots who pay attention to the spiritual side of things (since it's actually what's easier to lose).  ...Anyway -- that's lots of back-story; none of it may necessarily appear on screen.

#008
Must get back to brainstorming actual incidents.  Initial expository "vignette", with the gag that it's the robot who's actually speaking in expressive cursive.  "They live among us."  "We trust them."  "We're very different. / But better together."  "They're a little unnerving. / And we're so dependent on them. / What if they rose up against us? / Still... / Some of my best friends are human."  (Good -- I like the emphasis on emotion.)  Maybe I should insert the title after this incident?  And then instead of numbering the three vignettes, just put two seconds of black between the second and third?

#009
The human waxing poetic at the bot:  "O, Robot!  Perfected image of myself, / born of human genius! / Metal (brain-?) child / pinnacle of human achievement! / Cast in metal immortal! / Child of human genius -- cast in metal immortal! / child born from Zeus' forehead -- life forever, metal immortal!"  "So I'm a metaphor for the ideal you?"  "Yes!  Yes!  "...I wish I could fart."  ...Hm.  I feel like I've got the robot's voice in my head:  simple, pragmatic, empathic, sweet, longing -- but not longing to be human, that icky "I wish I could be human too!" Pinocchio / Uncle Tom character meant to prop up the superiority of the audience's "us".  ...The human voice, though -- I want it a bit more cranky and base.  I suppose I'm falling into the "innocence of the child" paradigm; the newborn's LED eyes see the world more clearly than its fleshopoid elders'.  Solution:  make the human not so much a cynic as a realist -- who sees the faults in everything except his own creation -- thus putting the burden on the bot to point out its own failings.

#010
"Robot -- you never forget, / live forever, / know your creator on a first-name basis / you are perfect in every way!"  "I wish I could fart."  (No good -- the fart joke only transcends its crudeness if the human is down on himself.)

#011
Robot:  "What do you wish?"
Human:  "To not be hungry / unhappy / confused / die someday."
Robot:  "So I'm a metaphor?  For the ideal you?"
Human:  "Yes."
Robot:  "I wish I was fleshy / moody / and could forget. /  I wish I could fart."
(It seemed to help to begin with the human singing out "O, Robot!", though -- to clearly establish identity.)

#012
Human:  "Robot, what do you wish?"
Robot:  "To be fleshy / moody / able to forget..."
Human:  "You wish you were me?"
Robot:  "Ironic, isn't it?"
Human:  "Yes.  You're never unhappy or confused, / and will live forever.  You're a metaphor for what I wish to be."
Robot:  "I wish I could fart."
(Maybe this vignette should have a title:  "Wishes".  ...The one-minute vignette almost has to have the rhythm of a joke.  You only have time for maybe five lines -- what kind of story can you tell in that time?  If the character is speaking in soliloquy, then they can just express an emotion outward into the universe.  But if you have two characters next to each other, then the expected action is some sort of communication...  New information is going to have some kind of surprise embedded in it -- which is the essence of a gag.)

#013
Robot standing next to the body of the human.  As time passes, sand is poured onto the body, until it disappears under a burial mound.
Robot:
"I can't always tell
if you're sleeping.
I wait
and I worry
If you die
who will take care of me?"
(In this form that I'm working in, with the words written on the backdrop, it's almost like I'm composing poems, or haiku.)

#014
Expository intro.  The gag is that it's the robot who's actually speaking.  (Like how in the previous episode, the gag was that the inventor actually *is* dead.  Misleading the audience vs. the character being the one who's misled.)  The words aren't written directly on the background -- instead we cut to an animated title card, thus keeping it unclear which character the words are emanating from.  The first few shots are of both robot and human -- the last shot is of the robot's head, showing that it's his voice we're hearing -- maybe writing on the backdrop for the first time, above his head.  The preceding shots should seem to be from the human's point of view...  The robot menacingly in the background...  The robot moving around while the human stands still, or simply turns in place in order to watch the bot.  Maybe the choreography has the robot moving from house left to house right behind the human, turning 90 degrees, and then proceeding into the foreground.  The camera could be at different angles, so we're not stuck with a flat proscenium staging, while maintaining the basic motion concept.  It'd be nice to have the human move, too, though, so I can demonstrate that he moves in curvy lines.

#015
Monologue from earlier, but put into "haiku" form, and with stage directions:
Robot:
"They're a little unnerving.     [robot, US, moves SR to SL behind; focus on human, CS]
And we're so dependent on them.     [closer shot of human, turning to watch robot]
What if they rose up against us?     [shot from above, looking down at an angle]
Still...     [more neutral shot of both]
Some of my best friends are human."     [close up on robot; words on backdrop, DOF permitting]

#016
The middle segment seems to be the least thought out.  In the first, I raise the threat of humans attacking robots; in the last, I show the poor robot left alone.  I guess the middle is where the "climax" ought to happen -- it's not a resting point, but where the robot-human relationship gets the closest scrutiny.  ...I've got this line about "metal immortal" floating around -- what I haven't done anything with is the "mud" angle.  I've been worried that folks might not be able to read the boxy figure as a robot -- but really, it's probably the clay-like mummy figure that's less likely to be understood.  "People are made of clay. But you -- metal is immortal."  (I think using "mud" in the title, and "clay" in this line could fly.)  Maybe the we / they plural voice again...  The human contemplating his species' existence...  Human:  "After we're gone, you'll still be here.  I've tried to make you everything I'm not."  Robot:  "Why?  Are you ashamed?"  Human:  "We are hungry, unhappy, moody, confused."  Robot:  "I wish *I* could fart."  (Meh...  I seem to be sliding toward the immortality angle.)

#017
So, the story seems to have evolved into one about the robot losing its creator; a tale of vulnerability and pathos.  The robot is insecure and doesn't know if it can survive on its own.  It doesn't have that utter confidence that robots so often have -- it's new to the world and uncertain.  The human, on the other hand, knows that he's going to disappear, and tries to care for his bot-child as best he can.  In the first story the human is mute and unknown; in the second he's saying goodbye; in the third he's gone.

ACT I.
They're a little unnerving
And we're so dependent on them.
What if they rose up against us?
Still...
Some of my best friends are human.  (or:  I was made by a humans)

ACT II.
Human:  After we're gone, you'll still be here
I  tried to make you everything I'm not.
Robot:  Why?  Are you ashamed?
Human:  We are...  hungry, unhappy, smelly, confused.
People are made of clay.
But you -- metal is immortal.  (or:  perfect)
Robot:  I wish *I* could fart.

ACT III.
I can't always tell
if you're sleeping.
I wait
and I worry
If you die
who will take care of me?

#018
For some of "hungry, unhappy, smelly, confused" sequence, maybe each word should appear separately -- perhaps even from a different camera angle each time.  The same concept might apply to "What if they rose up against us?"  ...This is a lot of dialogue for 3 minutes.  I worry about running out of film.

End of experiment.  ~3 hrs 30 min.

[Hm.  The retro b/w film stock also resonates with this being in the B film genre.  Nice.]