LSGL BRAINSTORM
Th 01.17.08

QUESTION:  What should LSGL Act II look like?  What questions am I trying to resolve with Act II?  What is the story that I’m trying to tell?

1.  POV:
Act II could be told from the point of view of the elder things, the shoggoths, or the humans interpreting what they see.

2.  Point of time in which the elder things speak from:
The elders could either be reviewing the several million year history which lead up to their current situation -- or they could be speaking from the POV of the shoggoth uprising having just happened -- it’s fresh in their minds, and they’re desperate.

3.  The broad outline of Act II:
The elder things came to earth.
The created cities, life, shoggoth servants, and established themselves.
The spawn of Cthulhu attacked, there was war, they were defeated.
The elder things enter a long period of decadence.
The shoggoths rise up and slay their masters; the elders are too weak to fight back.
A handful of survivors hide in a cave, hibernating, waiting for help.

4.  Protagonist?
There isn’t really a main character telling the story of the elders...   What if this were from the point of view of a government official who led the survivor out of the city through hidden tunnels?  Or what if the survivors are a handful of explorers/surveyors who were outside of the cities when the uprising took place?  What if the government official was a lone dissenter, who saw the uprising coming, and prepared the cave as a place of retreat?  Could the beacon message be their own personal story?  ...Wherein they talk about having been born during the aeons of decadence, having only heard about the mythical exploits of the first elders who came to earth and who fought in the cthulhu wars?  The test I keep coming back to:  could I do a close-up of the storytelling elder to convey greater emotion?  How to I create a protagonist if all of the elders look exactly the same?

5.  What if the beacon were the protagonist/speaker?
I am the knowledge repository of the great, old race.  I was brought here with the first colonists, and have watched over four million years of history.  If I went this route, it would allow a dispassionate telling of the history...  However, I would have to clarify the original function of the beacon and how it came to be in the cave.  This would mean I’m doing more to create an original character in the film than previously.

6.  Pictograms
I could try to tell the history using 2D images of the elders.  This would be more true to the original story, where the humans interpreted the story by reading bas relief wall carvings.  This raises several further stylistic considerations.  Should the pictograms be rough hewn, or very precise symbols (like the images used to communicate “men’s room”)?  Should the pictograms be static -- or should they move?  If they move, what kind of motion -- “squigglemation,” where they dance back and forth over just a few frames, full animation, or some sort of symbolic representation of activities?

7.  Camera moves
In Act I and Act III, the camera is fairly static...  The explorers move in Act I, and then the elder things stampede in Act III, radically livening things up.  I rather think that during Act II the camera will need to be more active -- the eye of history moving from one event to the next.  The camera could be doing pan-and-scan of still images, like Ken Burns...  It could be scanning across moving hieroglyphics -- so the reason that it’s moving is to focus on different little scenes within an ant farm of action.  The camera could be flying forward, taking turns, diving -- moving from one ant farm to the next.  The camera could be moving through a tunnel of time.

8.  Tunnel book
I could arrange Act II like a tunnel book, where there are static tableaus with holes in their middle area which the camera flies through at a constant rate.  It seems to me that the deeper tableaus would have to emerge from a black fog or ramp up from invisibility to full opacity -- otherwise there’d just be a chaos of lines in the center of the tunnel book.  Hypothetically, I could have the tableaus be 3D CG -- sort of like baroque puti flying around the edge of the picture frame, but frozen in time.  Hypothetically, I could also build the tunnel book for real, having models that wriggle and writhe via stopmo.  I could either have them appearing out of darkness by having a moving light (or moving prosceniums)...  Or I could film one proscenium at a time and then cross-fade between them digitally.

9.  Tunnel of time
I have a mental image I rather like, of glowing green rings of fire flying toward the camera, creating an implied tunnel.  The rings would be elongated vertically so that they’re actually ellipses -- a shape that echoes both the shape of the magic mirror and the bodies of the elders themselves.  The rings, to me, imply the passage of years in a visceral way.  Perhaps as the camera fall through this tunnel images could emerge and disappear...  Not tied to the rings themselves, simply floating, ghostly on the screen.  That way, the rings would bind together the disjointed images.  It would be OK if there were brief periods where there were no images on screen -- simply the rings shooting toward the audience while the narrator talks.  The rings would create a strong sense of rhythm...  Something that has been noticeably lacking in most of my other ideas -- they have no continuity or crescendo.

10.  Montage
Back in September, when last I was working on LSGL, I was trying to do a straight montage.  The images would be in 3D CG, like Acts I and III.  One of the problems this raises is fabrication.  I need to create a cityscape for the elders to exist in.  The montage option precludes showing cthulhu -- because it would simply be too difficult to model and animate this new creature.  The montage idea is also problematic because it demands that I create more animation sequences with the elder things -- which are simply horrendous to try to animate!  Thus far, I’ve animated an elder at rest, two versions of it waking up, the elder standing, running, falling down, and a pose of it lying dead on the ground.  I am not eager to do any more animated sequences with these models than I have to.  In fact, that might be a requirement for Act II:  let there be no more animation using the 3D elder things!

11.  Visual elements
When I first started working on LSGL, I had imagined the sequence where the elders are discovered, wake up and kill the dogs and explorers, and head back to the city...  Followed by two further explorers pursuing them to their city...  However, doing dogs and sleds and tents was going to be beyond my ability -- so I narrowed down my story to essentially three elements:  the explorers, a cave, and the elder things.  When I re-wrote the story at the beginning of 2007, I added two new elements:  the distress beacon, and the shoggoth.  The essential problem of Act II is that it raises the possibility of uncounted further sets, props, and actors.  Each visual element is expensive (in terms of time) to create.  Thus, I have to be very selective.

12.  The ant farm
Maybe instead of having a historical space that is deep in the Z dimension, I could have one that is wide on the X and Y axes.  There would be essentially one set, which is exceptionally large and flat.  I keep thinking of the graphics in the book “The Planiverse” and Larry Marder’s “Tales of the Beanworld” and “Bendito Machine” by Zumbakamera, which I saw on Channel Frederator.  The city would be the center of the story in this approach, with caves below it, mountains far to the side, and sky above, from which the spawn of cthulhu would arive.  It becomes a mythic space, with some of the flavor of the pictograms/hieroglyphics I mentioned earlier.

13.  Color schemes
It’s easiest for me to imagine the ant farm concept in terms of black silhouettes on white -- like drawings on paper, or shadow puppets which are illuminated from behind.  ...Which is unfortunate, because I’m pretty sure I want to use green lines on a black background.  Why?  partly because green on black still evokes “computer,” back from the days of TRS-80 and Commodore 64 computers.  But also because the elders eyes are green -- I’m going to act as if they see the world in green (like dogs see the world in black and white).  This raises an interesting thought:  If I did suddenly decide to go with Act II being told from the shoggoths’ point of view, perhaps I’d need to do the entire thing in a red color scheme?

14.  Distortion
When I sit down at the computer and experiment with different looks, generally I’m not tapping into these high concepts, like “deep” versus “wide and flat” pictorial space.  Instead, I find myself just noodling around with different ways to distort images using various filters.  This has lead to some interesting looks -- e.g. having the elders appear as whisps of smoke -- but it doesn’t really help me get at the core structure of the story or how to present it visually.

15.  Wild mind
At this point in the game, where I’m trying to come up with a strategy for telling 400 million years of history in 2 minutes or less, I need to be thinking up the wildest options possible.  At this point, it’s not a matter of finessing or tweaking -- I need the greatest variety of solutions -- and particularly ones that feel radical in approach.

16.  Goals
a)  Act II is at the core of the film, book-ended by the scenes in the cave -- therefore it should be able to stand as its own story, even if I deleted the rest of the film.
b)  I don’t want to have to animate any more of the 3D elder things, which are horrendously difficult to manipulate.
c)  The point of telling the “At The Mountains Of Madness” story is to show that these creatures that look so very alien from us “were men too.”

17.  The slavery angle
One of the problematic aspects of the story is that the elders were ethically clean using shoggoths as biological robots -- until they gave them intelligence, at which point the elders became slave masters.  If I want to show the humanity of the aliens, then it’s tempting to gloss over this ethical dimension.  The term I’ve been using (because Lovecraft used it) is “decadence.”  The elders increasingly gave over their responsibilities to the shoggoths, perhaps out of necessity during the war -- but then afterwards, it was a matter of laziness justified by arrogance, and ultimately a sign of weakness which the shoggoths could exploit.  This seems rather forgiving, to me...  Although, at the same time, I want to avoid a trope of “they turned to using slavery because they were cruel or evil” -- not because it goes against the humanization of the elders, but because demonizing slave-masters feels intellectually dishonest to me.

Now, on the other hand, if I take the shoggoths’ point of view, slavery becomes the most interesting fulcrum of the story.  We, the shoggoths should be grateful to our creators for having given us life -- and yet, they made us to be slaves -- and so we must kill the gods.  You cheer on the shoggoths for liberating themselves -- but then, when it turns out that their hatred will last forever, that there is a vow to hunt down and murder the last of the elder things, until the end of time -- then the moral pendulum swings in the other direction.  Suddenly the shoggoths become terrifying in their single-mindedness -- and we are compelled to feel some pity for the elders who have been damned, and who face genocide.

I suppose that’s what I’m weighing here...  There’s a scale of justice:  on the one side sits slavery -- and the other side sits genocide.  That’s the essence of the conflict between shoggoths and elders.

18.  Merits of the shoggoth POV
One plus of going with the shoggoths’ POV is that it’s a radical choice.  No one has ever humanized the shoggoths -- it’s unexpected.  In some ways this takes my core theme of “humanizing the alien” to a new extreme...  Elder Things are five-sided, but at least they have discernible eyes, arms, and legs.  Shoggoths, on the other hand, are massive blobs of protoplasm -- as un-anthropomorphic a species as you’ll ever find.  The closest thing to humanizing a shoggoth I can think of is the classic Star Trek episode where Kirk and Spock communicate with the silicon-based life form, which etches into the stone “no kill I.”

The shoggoths’ story is also more unified in terms of time and place.  Whereas the elders came from somewhere out in outer space hundreds of millions of years ago, the shoggoths were created here on Earth...  They don’t fly, so their existence is limited to caves, the oceans and the earth’s  surface....  They aren’t off in ambiguously defined regions of the solar system fighting wars.

19.  War on earth?
Reasonable question:  Were the shoggoths perhaps put to use in fighting the spawn of cthulhu?  Did the spawn of cthulhu ever make it down to Earth -- perhaps even into the citadel itself -- so that the fight was on the elder thing’s own turf?  What if instead of occurring in space, where the elders need wings, I could have the wars actually occur on land.

20.  Wings
Previously, my explanation for the elder things loss of their wings has been that they mutated biologically.  In some ways this has been a nice visual, echoing the moral/intellectual degradation that the elders fall into...  And yet, I haven’t really built much about it into the script.  The loss of wings seems like it would be a deeply significant thing to the elders -- that it would be symbolic of their fall from greatness...  Sort of like how Medieval Europe idolized the Roman Empire.

21.  Cloning tanks
Genetic drift coinciding with an ethical shift toward owning slaves, is a little too coincidental for my tastes, however.  One rationalization I’ve considered, however, is that the cloning tanks where the elders create both their own children and the shoggoths became damaged during the war.  If I go that route, then the cloning tanks become an important set that has to be explained on screen.  It’s not in the book -- so I’d be taking liberties.  It would be a bit disappointing to limit the scope of the story to Earth...  Making a story that’s supposed to be galactic in scope too intimate.  And by having the cloning tanks get knocked out, I’m not only eliminating the space scenes -- I’m also ignoring the other cities on Earth.  What if all the cloning occurs at one particular city?  Not the one that we’re at, but an outpost somewhere else...  Permitting a truly spectacular visual of the spires and domes collapsing?  If I do that, I’m back to either a montage or a straight telling of the story -- I can’t have the unified space that the wide 2D space (ant farm) or deep Z-axis (tunnel book) would provide.

22.  Continental drift
One visual that I keep coming back to is getting to watch plate tectonics sped up.  I’ve done some initial tests and it’s a more problematic  effect than I’d originally imagined.  When the Earth is spherical, you don’t get to see many continents at once -- which makes it more difficult to identify what it is that you’re looking at.  You can have the globe rotate, but then it gets a little confusing because you don’t have any common landmarks to keep you oriented as the sphere both spins and morphs.  You can have a flat map morph -- but then you lose the sense that the elders view the globe as if from outer space...  The sense that their perspective on existence is galactic, not terrestrial.

Also, there’s the problem of directionality of time.  If you start off looking at Pangaea, you think it’s an alien world that you’re viewing.  If you start off at present day earth and rewind through history, how can you tell that history isn’t actually being fast-forwarded?

Perhaps the best way to use plate tectonics would be to intersperse the aliens’ story with images of the globe, showing how it has changed during a particular era of the their history.  If I go that route, though, then I’m essentially breaking the story down into chapters -- which implies that Act II is going to be significantly longer than Acts I or III.

23.  Length of Act II
How long can I afford to have Act II be?  To an extent the answer depends upon what method of animation I decide to use.  If I opt for a method that is simple to animate, then I have the option of presenting a longer story -- but if I choose a difficult method, then I have to keep things short.

Presuming I use a method which allows me to tell a long story, should I choose to do so?  Currently I’m thinking of LSGL as a story in three brief acts -- 1-2 minutes each -- with a prologue prior to the title card, and possibly a brief epilogue showing the aftermath of the shoggoth’s attack.  But what if after all this hard work I’ve put in on acts I and III, they really are just book ends to the real story?  If that were the case, then Act II would really have to be the most compelling portion of the film.  Having the bookends out-shine the meat of the story feels all wrong.  Given how elaborate acts I and III are, though, I don’t know how they couldn’t overshadow the main story.  And certainly the explorers would become even more insignificant than before...

On the plus side (maybe) LSGL would become much more of an actual story.

24.  The problem of having no voice
I’ve worried about this film having no narrative...  I’m forcing the audience to interpret the visuals for themselves -- as if they are utterly on the outside of the story.  When there’s a narrative, a voice to hang onto, you get to be inside of someone else’s head.  That’s one of the great appeals of cinema -- getting to be inside of someone else’s skin with them.  The visuals are pretty...  But without getting emotion -- that is, investing yourself in someone’s POV, so that you can viscerally imagine their vulnerabilities and what they have at stake in any situation -- there’s nowhere to engage...  You remain on outside the house, peeking through a window, unable to hear what the people at the dinner table are talking about -- and it’s cold out here in the night, so you want to leave and go somewhere where it’s warm and people actually talk to you.

25.  Voice-over
As a rule, I hate voice-overs.  And yet, I’ve got these characters (the elders) who don’t have mouths!  If I’m going to tell the deep history of this people, then I’m not sure that there’s any way around having a voice-over.  It could be the explorers, the elders, the shoggoths, or the beacon itself speaking -- but someone has to explain what’s happening onscreen, and explain the significance of these events.  It is technically a possibility that I could simply show the images, and let the audience explain them as they will -- but it doesn’t seem really plausible.  (And I think it would be even harder for the audience to invest and follow along.  Gotta grab them and take them with me.)

26.  Alien language
An interesting variation:  The voice-over could be in an alien language, with subtitles.  Probably not a good idea...  Reading would distract from the images.  And there’s the question of who’s doing the translating.  George Lucas did it in Star Wars with Han and Greedo -- but Han could speak the language, so it made more sense.  I’ve already set in place that the beacon operates telepathically (it whispers to the explorers, which is what prompts one to touch it) -- so it seems appropriate that whatever voice we hear will be in the language that we ourselves know.  (Well, technically I think telepathy wouldn’t actually function in terms of language -- it would be non-linguistic understandings, which would be somewhat disorienting for the receiver, since there are concepts that only exist in one language and not in another -- but this is a sloppiness that has to be put up with.)

27.  New story elements
So, it looks like I’m considering several new story elements:
a)  loss of wings
b)  the cloning tanks
c)  how war came to earth (destroying the cloning tanks?)
d)  how the spawn of cthulhu were actually defeated
e)  the moment of choice when the elders give the shoggoths autonomous intelligence (when war comes to earth, to make the shoggoths into soldiers?)

28.  black on white / white on black
When I imagine a wide flat (ant farm) space for telling the story, I keep on imagining black lines on a white background -- like lines drawn on paper.  This doesn’t fit well with the notion of this message coming from the beacon...  However, I want to point out that black on white is generally easier to read.  When you look at white text on a black screen, it’s harder on the eyes than when you have black text on a white screen.  White things on black always convey that they are floating in space.  If I’m going to use line art, then, there’s an implied three-dimensionality -- as if I have taken green wire, twisted it into shapes, and am illuminating it while it hangs from the ceiling in a dark room.  With a white background, on the other hand, we find it easier to imagine a horizon line...  Perhaps because we have such familiarity with paper....  So we just assume that there’s a horizon line drawn across the center of the page/screen, which allows us to plant characters in the foreground with more sense that they’re actually standing on something.

29.  Other backgrounds for line art
What if the background for the drawings seemed to be stone?  Or a swirling spiral?  Or flat blue?  Or green lines on red?  Or shallow etchings into a wall of TV static?  What if I scanned various paper textures?  Cracked mud?  Plant leaves?  The texture of elder skin?  Boiling sugar shoggoth skin?

30.  What if the story were told through acrylic paintings?  The idea reminds me of the original beginning of David Lynch’s “Dune”...  It doesn’t feel like it’s cinema-worthy...  And yet, the exteriors are done in the style of paintings.  What if I did hand-painted color backdrops, and then had 2D pictogram elders walking on top?  It would be an accomplishable look -- but I don’t see much logic to it.  Even if I used PhotoShop to make my paintings look as much like the exterior paintings as possible, I don’t think limited-animation pictograms would work...  I’ve already established that the lavamen exist in that environment -- so the elders would have to have at least that much motion.

31.  2D CG
An idea I had last night...  My elder thing models in Lightwave are three-dimensional and have five sides (fifteen limbs, when you count arms, legs, and eyestalks).  However, I could create two-dimensional models.  They would be flat silhouettes, rigged with skeletons that have rotational limits keeping everything moving in just one plane.  Benefits:  (a) It would be far, far easier to animate these than the full 3D models.  (b) Using a hieroglyphic space, I could give the elders just two arms and two legs -- which would do much to humanize them.  (c) The easier it is to animate my characters, the more story I have room to tell.  (d) I could preserve the crisp, elegant lines of the elders, which I’ve worked so hard to create.

The 2D CG tentacles would be easier to work with in LightWave than in AfterEffects or Flash...  I’ve already worked out how to create bone chains in LW...  Whereas in AE and Flash, I can’t really bend things -- I have to use the paper-cut out look, or very imprecise distortions.  In LW I could have the silhouettes be solid blocks of a single color...  Or outlines...  Or I could create a image map to give them X-ray insides...  Or I could distress the solid silhouettes in post, making them look more like wisps of smoke.

32.  Hand-drawn animation
I’ve considered doing Act II in hand-drawn animation, but it’s probably not really feasible.  If there’s motion, I could see animating the tentacles -- but not the legs.  I could use “squigglemation,” where I cycle three three hand-drawn frames with slight inconsistences, simply to give the images a bit of life...  But even then, I can’t really do walks -- it’d just be the icons sliding across the screen.  That means I’d have to do pan-and-scan Ken Burns’ type effects...  Which is unappealing now, having used that method for “Madness from the Sea.”

33.  Carving into clay tablets
It would be interesting to create static images by carving into actual tablets of clay...  It would be an enjoyable process...  And it would in some ways be truer to the original novella...  But I don’t see how it would make any sense, given that the images are supposed to be being transmitted by the distress beacon.

34.  Combined 2D CG and montage
I could have the Act II story told primarily through two-dimensional, fully-animated pictograms...  And then occasionally have the ghostly image of a 3D scene appear superimposed over it...  For instance, an image of a waking elder, who is presumably telling the story...  Or a pile of dead elder thing bodies...  The cave entrance before Antarctica became cold...

There are elements that I might want to specifically withhold, though -- for instance the shoggoths.  I could portray them in 2D, but if I save their 3D appearance for Act III, then it would be more powerful.  Similarly, It’s one thing to have 2D versions of the elder things running -- but the bulk of the spectacle of Act III is about actually getting to see the elders stampeding.

35.  Spectacle vs. Story
When I consider what it is that has excited me about LSGL, largely it’s about the spectacle:  a hive full of aliens, a beacon that bursts to life with lightning, a fifty foot tall shoggoth dealing out smack-down, a stampede of five legged monsters.  Even the color palette is supposed to be about spectacle...

That was one of my first inspirations, to depart from the scratchy black and white fare, and instead deliver neon colors -- at the center of which is the visual of hot red human silhouettes against a cold blue icy background.  There is a system of ideas inherent in the color...  About heat and cold (red and blue) and about alien-ness (green)...  And a system of ideas about resolution: the humans are less photo-realistic than the aliens, because they are far older -- they are the ultimate truth.  Still, despite having these ideas that mash-up experimental art films with the pulpy sci fi/horror genre, my color choices are ultimately about shock value...  They play into the spectacle, giving something that is delicious and awe-inspiring to look at.

When I think about the center act of this film, I’m having a hard time feeling like it’s going to be a spectacle.  I’m seeing ways in which I can tell the story...  But it places ideas above visuals.  Because of the scope of the history, I have to rely upon the audience to fill in some gaps with their imagination.  The main gap, it looks like, might be the third dimension; I provide flat images, they have to flesh them out into 3D images.

That’s not necessarily bad...  So long as act II is roughly the same length as the other acts, this feels like suspense that I’m building.  I’m making people wait -- just a little while -- to see what a real live massacre looks like.  However, if act II radically outweighs the bookends, then it stops feeling like suspense...  That’s the real story, and the spectacles on either side of it are just teases, showing you how much you’re being deprived of in the middle bit.

36.  Searching for spectacle
When Ray Harryhausen was developing a film, he’d do illustrations of the “key scenes” -- the moments in the film that make the entire effort worthwhile.  George Lucas hired Ralph McQuarrie to do the same thing for Star Wars.  For act I, the key shots for me are seeing the explorers dwarfed beneath the elders, seeing the explorer reaching out to touch the beacon, and seeing the beacon exploding with lightning.  For act III, the key shots are seeing an elder thing stand up, seeing elders fleeing from the monsterously huge shoggoth, and seeing the explorers trapped inside the stampede as giants run past them on all sides.  But what about act II?  What are the moments of awe?

Perhaps my problem in finding moments of spectacle is that in looking at how to tell the story of the elders’ history, I’m viewing all my story elements as straight-forward facts...  Depriving them of all MOOD.  ...Who cares about history?  History is a notoriously boring catalog of dull facts, which we are hard pressed to differentiate between.  The Spanish-American War and the War of 1812 -- the dates and opponents are different, but other than that, they’re essentially anonymous in my mind...  Utterly lacking in color and texture.

37.  Spectacle via composition and camera angle
When I think back to how I came up with my compelling shots for acts I and III, I remember finding compelling camera angles and compositions.  The beacon exploding and the shoggoth emerging into the cave both have centered compositions:  a strong horizon line, and a strong vertical right in the middle of the screen.  The shoggoth’s reveal is inspired by the moment in the 1933 version of King Kong where Kong bursts through the gate into the villager’s side of the island, like Grendel breaking into the long house.  Its such a fantastic tableax, it excites me to steal it for my own film.  Looking up at the elders dwarfing the explorers and seeing the elders stand up are both composed so that the camera is low and looking up at the elders at an angle, amplifying the sense of how huge they are.  Most of the shots with the explorers in them are designed to play with scale -- giving a powerful sense of just how small these men are relative to what’s around them -- even though they may themselves feel that they are big and courageous.

38.  Spectacle via reference
As I said, the shoggoth’s reveal steals its power from a shot from King Kong.  Is this a strategy I could use again?  I have an art principle that states “don’t create, comment.”  If I were to somehow collage Act II together out of scenes from other films, which films and which scenes would I use?  I mentioned earlier that the “ant farm” concept is an amalgamation of “Planiverse,” “Beanworld,” and “Bendito Machine”...  Could I perhaps go back to these original sources and look for shots that I could recycle?  I was thinking to myself last night:  This sequence is essentially the telling of a history over many years...  What films do I know of that also tell histories, which I could use as a starting place for my own?

The prologue to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings comes to mind...  There’s that shot of Sauron in the middle of a battle, smacking soldiers with his weapon, and whole groups of men being lifted off the ground, flung into the air....  Could I use something like that for the Cthulhu sequence?  Jackson also comes to mind, because I noticed that “Fellowship of the Ring” was his strongest installment in the series...  In my opinion because there had already been a film version of it produced -- so he had something to study and improve upon, rather than having to create by scratch.  I can see great value to this approach...  There’s no film version of At The Mountains Of Madness for me to bounce off of -- but maybe I can find scenes in other films that serve the same purposes.  [Notice that George Lucas also built Star Wars out of other films -- WWII dogfights, Tarzan swinging on his vine, the clowns from Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress,” Errol Flynn swordfights...]

39.  A lack of texture
The “ant farm / 2D CG pictogram / wide flat story space” concept is particularly difficult to utilize for mood.  There are no camera angles.  There can be compositions of elements within the frame, but everything is viewed straight on.  There’s probably no overlapping of characters -- no depth even in a 2D space.  There’s no variation of color or texture...  All these things that I love so much about stopmo are missing in this sequence...  There’s more of a feeling of looking at a jigsaw puzzle.  All the elements are sitting on a table, and you just want to see how they interact with each other.

40.  A mural-based animatic
This might be an interesting way to test out the story telling concept...  I could draw the entire universe of the elder things’ history on a big piece of butcher paper using either sharpie markers or brush and ink.  I’d take photographs of the mural that encompass the entire page, I’d take photos of details of the mural.  Some of the elements of the mural I’d PhotoShop so that they were cut-outs that could be moved around to interact with other elements.  And then I’d import all these bits into AfterEffects and simply move them around.  I suppose I’d try writing a rough script and then record it -- so I’d have a voice track to animate to.

It’s an interesting variation on the classic animatic...  Usually for animatics you’d draw storyboard panels, backgrounds, and free-floating characters.  You’d have a stack of separate elements to work with.  In this scenario, I’d have a master mural -- essentially a single image -- which I was modifying and playing with.

41.  Creating micro stories
Process-wise, I find it intriguing to consider making full-fledged films using At The Mountains Of Madness as their basis, which don’t all get included in LSGL.  An animatic is essentially a fully complete story...  It’s useful in part because it’s a low-investment project; you don’t get fussy perfecting it -- it’s simply meant to be proof-of concept...  Ideally something that you can throw together in a day or two.  (I realize this isn’t the case for feature films, like Ratatouille, where you might use 3D pre-vis to really nail a segment -- truly perfecting it before going into full CG.)

There’s an appeal to the idea of being able to point at finished projects, albeit rough, being able to say I’ve tried different variations.  It feels like doing that would give me a tangible sense of progress.  On the other hand, perhaps I really need to force myself to stay here, working in text until I’ve got something that work.  Text is probably the least labor-intensive way to develop a story.  I have to keep reminding myself:  even though I’ve typed 11 pages at this point, I don’t actually have any key scenes yet, no real story-telling, no camera angles...  I have remarkably little -- despite all the clarification work I’ve put in today.

42.  Digging into the story
I think if I’m going to make any images with emotional weight in act II, I’m going really have to dig into the poetics of the moments, rather than treating this sub-tale as a bland list of facts, a chain of generic events...  What does it feel like for a shoggoth to wake into consciousness?  Is King Cthulhu wrathful, uncaring, lustful...?  How did it feel to be a pioneer on Earth?  To lose the cloning tanks, where all future children might come from?  To look back upon the time when your species had wings?