Movie test 1

Animatic

Screen Test Shots

Charact sheet examples

Scenery references

Script

External:
Camera zooms towards the house from the garden, passing large pumpkin .

Fade out

Internal:
Man is sitting at the dinner table picking at his plate. His wife is opposite by the sink doing the washing up. Her back is to him.

Cut to:
Close up of the man finishing off his dessert, then he turns his head and stares out the window and smiles to himself.

Cut to:
Wife turns to face him while wiping her hands, she smiles as she watches him , she follows his gaze out the window and spots the pumpkin, she then turns to look at the calendar on the wall.

Cut to:
Camera zooms into the calendar on the wall to see days crossed off leading towards halloween.

Fade Out

Internal: Bedroom, Morning
Man wakes up and gets out of the bed.

Cut to:
He walks into the kitchen now fully dressed passed his wife who is pouring tea for two at the breakfast table. He goes straight into the garden.

External: Garden
Man walks up to his pumpkin, kneels beside it and hugs it, strokes it then waters it.

Internal: Kitchen
Wife is in the kitchen reading pumpkin carving magazines.

Fade out

Fade in:
Zooms in on the man sleeping in his bed.

Cut to: Dream
That night man dreams of him and the pumpkin in a romantic scene

Fade out

Fades in: Kitchen
Its morning man comes into the kitchen and the wife has already put up halloween decorations, husband looks at wife and she shows picture of jack-o-lantern she wants to carve.
His eyes widen then she pulls out carving knife with big smile on her face.
-He shakes his head scared and reaches for her as she heads towards the door.
-They wrestle for a bit and he ends up slapping her across the face.
-She looks at him horrified, fades out

Fade in:
Wife walks out front door with her bags packed, gets into taxi and drives of. Husband watches her leave at the front door all sad. When taxi drives off he closes the door

Cut to External: Garden
He comes out into the garden and stares at the pumpkin. Pause. he then drops to his knees and hugs the pumpkin.

Fades out: The End

Character Ideas

Story line

Story line 1

Pumpkins are not the most lovable of vegetables, but to this one man, it is the love of his life. But to his wife, the pumpkin he planted and grew would be the perfect Jack-O-Lantern for this halloween.
Now he must find a way to stop his once loyal wife, hell bent on owning the best halloween decoration, from carving his perfect pumpkin.

Story line 2

A young boy and his older brother were two thieves on a cruise ship when a storm hit the ship and they were washed up onto an awkward large rock that had no vegetation or access to fishing. All they had between them was a small and a large bag of food. The eldest brother shared out the food giving his youngest brother the small bag saying as he was the smallest, he should receive the smallest bag. The younger brother was furious, snatched the bag and refused to sit with his sibling. Many days pass and the younger brother was beginning to starve for he had the smaller half, so he decided to go to the other side and steal some of his brothers food, kill him for it if he had too. But when he got there he saw his brothers bag was still full and in opening it found it was full of gold and jewel of which they robbed and that he had not had any share of food but had eaten his leg instead.

Story line 3

Two pirates are swept onto opposite ends of a small desert island. One has a treasure map of the island, the other has a loaded gun. The pirate with the map immediately starts to hunt for treasure and soon discovers that it is on top of a very steep sided hill. Eager to claim his prize, he begins to climb the hill. He reaches the top just enough to peer over the lip, and sure enough, there is the treasure chests. Unable to contain his excitement, he slips and falls into an open chest at the foot of the hill. He vows to guard the treasure to make sure no one else claims it. Some time later, the pirate with the gun arrives at the hill and sees his friend. He asks what he is doing there and inside a chest, so the other explains. He makes an agreement with the other to share the treasure, hands over his gun, and climbs the hill. He reaches the top, drags one of the chests to the edge of the hill, opens it and looks inside. To his horror, there is nothing inside. He opens all the other chests, and they are all empty. He sees his friend who is watching in nervous anticipation from the bottom of the hill. Looking down, he yells to his friend that he is not going to let him have the treasure and they should live together without it, and climbs down. Furiously, the pirate in the box pulls the gun on the other, and shoots him. At that moment, the chest on the edge of the hill falls down revealing that it was empty all along. The he realized that his friend knew that upon discovering the chests were empty would have broken his heart, and lied to him to protect his feelings, and now he is stuck on the island alone.

Old Toy Design Inspirations

Barry Purves

Tara Mcpherson

Quentin Blake

I also decided to look at Quentin Blake's illustrations, the scratchy uneven angular characters create a similar kind of feel to Tim Burton's style of drawing for his character designs.
These types of illustrations are the kind of style I want to use as reference for my work, to create a kind of dark surrealist atmospheric kind of animation.

Tim Burton on Animation

With Tim Burtons unique surrealist style his characters are preferred to be tall, thin with small feet, which creates a challenge when it comes to making the puppets and expecting them to perform the actions in the script, especially since balance is one of the main difficulties of the character design.
Burton's stylised puppets are uncomfortably sharp and angular, best stand out in a specific light with lots of atmospheric shadow making his work look dark but usually well supported by voice actors and soundtrack.
Even his live actions film such as Beetle Juice and Edward Scissor Hands were filmed in the same atmospheric grotesque other worldly way.
A Nightmare Before Christmas character models were done by the finest animators in the world that brought the creepy characters eerily to life on an elaborate sets with grotesque anthropomorphic buildings, crumbling masonry, rusting railings and dank cobbled streets, all which were textured to have the look of the scratchy cross-hatched, pen work found in Tim Burtons original drawings.
With the triumph of model making and animation especially with the gracefully thin Jack Skeleton that James and the Giant Peach was unable to capture the same imagination as Tim Burton's darkly disturbing Nightmare.