First Blog (Flog?) CGI Animation Genre

I'm not going to really overthink this so apologies in advance if this is the worst blog you've ever read.

Hello, OK so I am currently onto number 8 of the 55 genres I am attempting to write. Deadlines are every ten days so each genre will either have a deadline of a Sunday or Thursday. So depending on what number I am on, when I write this blog I will either be on the final day of a genre or in the middle of one. I hope to write a new blog each Sunday.

Current seven genres completed. I'm curious what the ratio will be of stories having a good: bad ending.

And I just started a new job, started playing LOTR Online and have other projects to write! Look at me being all productive!

So...the current genre.

CGI Animation. This might be the hardest genre I've done so far because of the fact it's not really a genre, is it? I mean, usually I have thought about the usual tropes found in a genre and then tried to work a story from them. For example, spy movie genre I thought about the man in the van, watching the spy and helping them on their fancy spy mission. With the pirate genre I thought about buried treasure and deserted islands. CGI Animation is too vague really for my own liking. Currently I have less than ten hours to go to have a short CGI Animation script written and I only have FADE IN: written.

It'll be fine!

This may not make any sense but I'll attempt to explain my thought process I will be going through as I figure out a story to write today.

Because I don't have any usual tropes to latch onto I focus on words. CGI meaning of course, Computer Generated Italians, so looking at each word the one that stands out to me is...

(Googles CGI again)

...Computer Generated Imagery! So looking at each word the one that stands out to me is computer. This might be a character? Maybe a setting? A story set inside a computer? A computer creating characters. Is it a psychotic computer playing with these created characters? HAL 9000 sort of thing? Which leads me to remember that film I have only watched once but I really liked it, the 2009 post-apocalyptic movie 9.

I really should watch this again. So now I have some sort of road to follow: angry computer/robot as an antagonist. In the movie 9, the stitchpunks were up against the terrifying, human eradicating Fabrication Machine. If you look at the image above it even has the cool red eye, HAL 9000 thing going on. I think it'd be really fun to create some sort of evil machine like that, right? Make them some way unique in my own way?

But! Isn't that the usual step? Machine is evil and wants to wipe out our protagonist because the machine is an unstoppable, remorseless...uh...well, machine!

Why not write a story with a happy, lovely ending instead. My own HAL 9000 type machine but less murder more musical. I think that would be a lot more fun and unexpected. I still want some sort of conflict going on but I'm not going to go the death and destruction route and more the "HAL 9000 wants to help two feuding CGI characters before they get together and sing their big song about friendship". I think this computer story would stand out more as a happy musical. For some reason my mind wanders from the word Happy to...

Sunday Monday happy days

Tuesday Wednesday happy days

Thursday Friday happy days

Saturday what a day

Rockin' all week for you

From The Fabrication Machine to The Fonz. Keep in mind the show Happy Days ended three years before I was even born so I have no idea why my brain decided that's where this was going. So I know practically nothing about this show or the characters. Time to google again.

Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, is the full name of the Fonz and since I want to create my own HAL character I think I'm going to call him HERB. The friendly, cool machine called HERB who plays some cool music you might find in a jukebox? (The Fonz used to vandalize jukebox's for his own twisted enjoyment right?)

So there is one character. Now I think if I create two more little characters then I can have them argue over some issue for HERB to solve for a happy end to the short. I'm not an animator or anything but I want to consider that this can't be insanely difficult to create. After all, my #55Genres challenge does have a rule that the shorts all have to be low or no budget so I won't write a huge epic battle scene. I'm thinking we would see the story on screen as the computer screen. Our two characters, simple little designs of them like the paddles in Pong or something, and then either just HERB's voice or a red dot on screen representing HERB.

So now I just have to think of some dialogue. Going back to the movie 9, if you go to its Wikipedia page it mentions the short film the feature was developed from and the themes and motifs in the short. Humanity and machines, Commonalities of humans, Humans and nature. So I think I'm going to spend some time looking up these themes and possibly working the conflicting characters issue around these.

But keep it light, this story is really about HERB, a Computer Generated as Italian.

Upcoming genres are: Stop-Motion Animation

Live Action Animation

Action Comedy

Buddy Comedy

Black Comedy

Thanks for reading

Kevin