Three for One
Back when I was in college with big dreams of film making the one book I read over and over was Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew“, where he documents the making of his first film “El Mariachi.” Originally he planned to make three low budget films for the Mexican home video market, and by the time he finished the third he would be a real filmmaker. This flawless plan was undone by the small problem that El Mariachi became an independent hit and launched him into stardom.
While I wish he had done two more for Mexican home video before becoming a film wunderkind as none of his following work has had the character of El Mariachi – it’s like his “American Graffiti” – I’m starting to think that I should try his original plan. Animation is pretty difficult and it is hard to put all your eggs into one long work, especially when halfway through you get tired of the characters.
My thought is to take the same set of characters and write a five minute, fifteen minute, and forty minute scripts for them. First, the effort put into writing the five and fifteen minute scripts will be invaluable in working on the forty five minute scripts, especially when it comes to plotting and characters. Second, much of the cost of character development and production design will be front-loaded onto the first two productions, meaning most of the problems will have been solved for the forty five minute production. And if I’m bored with the characters after the first project, it will leave a nice exit point.
In other news, I went back to the KU library to do research on the films. After my initial shock of how everything that has changed at Watson since my time at KU – they have concessions now! – I browsed the dusty stacks until found the books I needed. Special thanks and one up bonus to Brian who came with me and let me use his library card to check out my research materials . The down side is that I need to rewrite everything I’ve written thus far, but I’m getting new ideas about how history can play into the story. Exciting stuff.