What am I Working on This Week? 01/31/21

 So, I've made two updates to the script for the Present. I helped the environment design team with their ideas for how the environments should look. I'm excited to see what they come up with in the next couple of weeks.

 These are the things that I'm be working on this coming week.

• Emily character design (two ideas)
• Time Machine design
• Fully polish the script
• Rough storyboarding for key moments by monday the 8th.

 I have a weird sense of being both ahead and behind at the same time. I think because I have a general idea of the scope of the project I have small amounts of panic, because I know it's big (and our mentor Christine did not help with her stories of how her team went about doing things), but I'm also not really stressing, because we have almost a year and a half.

Flip the Script

 Wednesday night I stayed up way too late and ignoring other work in order to work on this. Let me rephrase, I worked on this because I really didn't want to do the other work. Obviously I'm going to do the other stuff (may have finished the other stuff by the time this is posted),  but sometimes you just don't want to

Anyway, the following is an excerpt from my first draft of the script for an adaptation of the Present by Simon Rich.

1    INT. XANDER’S APARTMENT – NIGHT                          1

WE OPEN on the inside of a small one-room apartment. There is a light shining from the kitchen. EMILY (27) sits on the COUCH, clutching a PILLOW and crying. She is draped in shadow. On the COFFEE TABLE is a bouquet of TULIPS. XANDER (28) is standing behind a CHAIR.

XANDER

I don’t Understand. I thought you liked tulips!

     EMILY looks up at XANDER

                        EMILY

I do. It’s just… You get them for me every year. It’s starting to get a little impersonal. I mean, this time you didn’t even include a card

     XANDER winces

                        XANDER

I apologize. I obviously made an error in judgement

XANDER sits on the COUCH and attempts to take EMILY’S hand. EMILY pulls her hand away.

                   EMILY

D-Do you remember what I did for your birthday? I got you that new Bunsen burner you wanted. I knit you a pair of wool socks so your feet wouldn’t get cold in the lab. You never make that effort for me. All you do is think of yourself.

XANDER

That is incorrect. What about Emiladium? It took me nine months to synthesize that element, and I named it after you

XANDER picks up a MAGAZINE from the COFFEE TABLE to illustrate his point. The MAGAZINE has a picture of XANDER on the front cover.

EMILY

You were going to synthesize that element anyway. You needed it for your secret project, the silver orb thing in your lab. Emiladium wasn’t about me, it was about you. For gods sake you won’t even tell me what it does!

     They BOTH are slumped over, clearly unhappy

XANDER

Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?

EMILY

I don’t know… It’s not like you can go back in time and get me a different present.

XANDER perks up, his expression brightening. He stands.

XANDER

Wait here. I… I will be right back.

Xander runs out of the room leaving EMILY on the COUCH.

And that's that. I stayed up way too late Wednesday night to finish this script. And obviously, I just gave you an excerpt here. there's no need to spoil the full story for you, especially when things are liable to change.

Who am I? What is This?

 My name is Andrew Denike. I am a junior in the 3D Animation program at CU Denver. The juniors in the department have just recently started working on our three semester capstone courses for our degree.

In order to graduate, we have to take all of the things we've learned over the last two and a half years, and create a short film.

Now, normally that's a panic inducing thing (and I'm not not panicking, believe me), but it's going to be okay. I have a great team, and we're working with a great story for our short.

Yesterday we hammered out how we're going to work on the project, and what kind of roles we want to take within the group. I ended up on the writing team, the storyboard team, the character design team, and the character sculpting team. I'm story design and character creation, just like I wanted.

Anyway, we have a schedule starting to fall into place and the first order of business is to get a script so we can get started seeing how things are going to shape up.