Ok, I've just been brainstorming some rough ideas for the film and it's plot/narrative structure. All of these are just suggestions and as they're the first ones, they're gonna need to be changed. I won't mind if you don't like them or don't want to use them, even if you don't we can work almost as if by process of elimination and it'll allow us to focus on some different ideas.
Ok, so i was thinking about the opening sequence. I thought of two ways to do it (other than a normal news broadcast from a studio). Using a slow building fade from black title sequence with the piano and news reporter in the background we could then use one of the following:
The first could be the reporter doing an initial report after just arriving at the scene, explaining to the audience what is happening and establishing the setting, things have only just started to "animate" themselves.
OR
Join the reporter as he's manically describing what's happening as it's right at the peak/climax of the animations whilst in the background you can see it all happening, fade to black and display a "5 Hours Earlier" or something so we can give some sort of back story and explanation of how ths happened.
In terms of giving some sort of explanation of how this happened, i thought it might be quite cool to go back to that AEtuts tutorial on making a realistic district 9 composite, and instead of having a space ship in the sky, use this energy ball:
There's a tutorial on how to make it on videocopilot and i think we could make it look quite nice. We don't even have to give a reason for why it's there if we just jump straight in with the news report. The kind of emphasis behind it is that this mysterious ball of light/energy is causing all this weird shit to happen, animations start jumping off computer screens, the green and red men at pelican crossing come to life and jump down
As for your pacman idea, you could have someone standing outside the building you're intending to do it on playing pacman on their phone and they could look up in shock and see that
a giant pacman is actually on the wall in front of him.
For your speech bubble type idea, i'm not quite sure how that could fit in. Someone could be reading a comic book or one of the comic strips that you get
in like the Daily Mirror or the Sun and that causes similar bubbles of though to appear above their own heads.
One more idea i had was to maybe have like a missing dog poster, but the picture of the dog in the poster comes to life and starts barking. I think this
would be pretty simple, all we'd need to do is motion track a freeze frame from a video of a dog onto the poster, and then unfreeze it so it looks as if
instead of a picture on the wall it's a video.
Like i said at the beginning, these are all just rough/draft ideas for some sort of plot or narrative, there's multiple ways we could do this. We could
just do it as if we were documenting it, going around the city with a camera and filming all this weird shit happen or we could turn it into a sort of news
report, filming on handy cams as well to emulate the public capturing footage and sending it into the station (could also photoshop up some really nice
images of the ball in the sky and use those as if they've been sent in by members of the public also)
Don't worry if you don't like these ideas, i really won't mind and perhaps we can either modify them or use them to steer us in the direction of alternative
narratives. Either way, we need to get these down asap so we can start doing some test shots of the kind of things we're going to need to film and
also do some storyboards and perhaps a script.
Also, i think i told you but i won't be here this weekend, i'm going back to Norwich to DJ on sat night, gonna leave friday and come back on sunday so i won't be able
to do much over those couple of days.