On wednesday 20 April
I presented one of the final 4 stories called Dial-down. This is the full presentation and comments given.
Logline: Old phone takes revenge on the New phones and daughter who replace him.
Main Character(s): Old dial phone
Character(s): Father, Daughter, old dial phone, new flip phone
Medium : 3D
Genre: Thriller, Drama
Target Audience: Teens and adults
Audience Experience: To be creeped out and to not expect the ending.
Timeline : Early 2000s/ 1990s
Message: Don’t betray your friends or throw away what is perfectly fine.
ESTIMATED DURATION: 3 MINUTES
Character Background
Mary
The antagonist, a 5 year old girl
Wants the latest things and is pampered like a princess
Spoilt, looks overly adorable, manipulative and is really good actress
She needs to be less egotistical and treasure what she has
Old phone
Protagonist, dialed phone
Determine to take revenge on Mary
Needs closure
Jealous, Expressive, loud and can be sadistic
Doesn’t speak until someone answers the phone
Has ‘tattoos’ and scratches of Mary’s name written by Mary
Dom
New phone
Side character, a flip phone
Bought by the girl to replace the dialed phone
Makes a beeping sound when press its button
Story Beats
MARY is watching tv when there is an advertisement about the new flip phone and she looks sadly at her own old phone.
She breaks the old phone with a hammer.
Old phone is sad and terrified as he did not expect that to happen.
She presents the cracked phone to her father, DOM, pretending to be sad and points to the new phone on the TV.
She abandons her phone and DOM gets her a new phone.
MARY goes to the toilet while using the phone.
Suddenly, the toilet flushes and she drops the phone into the toilet bowl.
She fishes it out of the bowl and the new phone is slightly damaged but still alive.
She carefully wipes it clean and holds it gingerly, but trips over and breaks it completely. She turns to see what she tripped over.
Heartbroken, she goes to DOM with a genuine sad face and presents the spoiled, wet smartphone.
He does not want to give her a new smartphone so he passes her her old phone that still can work. So MARY takes it sadly and walks back to her room.
As she is walking, the camera zooms into the old phone’s face. Its’ facial expression turns from grateful to an evil smirk.
Flashback starts: The girl is in the toilet and when she tilts her head or moves her head you can see the old phone jumping on the toilet flush. We see the old phone tripping her with his cord.
Flashback ends
Mary walks out of her room and into the living room.
Through the window, the audience can see the shadow of MARY being strangled and disemboweled by the old phone on the wall.
Story Graph
Style Guides
Sketches
List of Assets & Programs
CHARACTERS:
Dialed phone
Flip phone
Dom
- Mary
ENVIRONMENTS & OBJECTS:
Bedroom
Toilet
Squatting toilet
Television
Hammer
PROGRAMS:
Maya
Mudbox
- Photoshop
Selling Point: 3D animation and exaggerated movement; unexpected ending
-end presentation-
Comments by the teacher:
The comments were harsh yet helpful. The Motivation of the main character isn't strong enough, have a better reason on why he wants to kill the girl. There is an unexpected ending but its very dramatised. The one of the character design of the story doesn't match with the other.
We won't be developing on this story as my members think that the story Alvin presented underneath has the least amount of problems and seems to be one of the stronger stories. Since we are still in the earlier part of the process we are trying to come up with new ideas still to see if we can come up with a deal breaking story.
So far for Underneath we are tweaking parts like; the environment they live in, what is their social norms, animals could be the majority of this story while humans are the minority thats why Stanley has to dress up as an animal. Or is it like fashion, if they lived in a junkyard world, wearing fishbowl hats, wearing plastic bags are the in trend.
