Life drawing - Semester 2

2 Characters and a Setting - The Art of Dentistry

The idea behind the film was an egg i'd been sitting on since summer 2013. After spending a long time travelling on trains, i had time to hatch ideas, some of them being for the titles of the ECA graduate film show.  

The gist of the idea was a man arriving at a dentist office and having "ECA 2014" carved into his teeth. All the elements required were there, the two characters (dentist, patient) and the setting (dentist office)


INSPIRATION


Omelette from Madeline Sharafian on Vimeo.

My main inspiration was from "Omelette" by Madeline Shatafian. The strong and stylised look of the thing, obviously well storyboarded and laid out, the subtle movements, humorous expressions and general cheery feeling were all things that i wanted to emulate in my film. But i also didn't want to make a clone of the film at the same time.

CHARACTER DESIGN
 
I created the characters with incongruity in mind. I had the image from the start that it would be humorous to have a neat businessman go in and get a pretty punk rock tooth modification.

PATIENT

I explored different looks, but settled on the one above, as i found it to be the most funny.

DENTIST

I had more trouble designing the dentist, should she be tall/short? thick/thin? what i really wanted was to make her appear really sweet, but become viscous and scary when it came to the dentist chair. Short and plump did the trick. It was also slightly based off of my own dentist. But she was just a plain sweetheart, not as evil. Despite always trying to push for me to get cosmetic work done. Despite the two characters having slightly similar body shapes, their silhouettes and skin tones were different enough to identify them apart.

COLOUR

In order to further the differences between the two characters i thought it best if i utilise the colour of their clothes in order fr easy identification and lack of confusion

   
 Dentists always wear those gross minty colours like they are toothpaste. big contrast to the patient's old grey clothes. (i chose the middle drawing as the colour palette) and pasty face.

SETTING

I found the setting to be pretty self explanatory. It's a dentist office. Duh.
There are some pretty unique things about a dentist office that will let you know its a dentist office. The chair for example, where else do you see that?

See? the location is clear.

I also like to make little floorplans. Just a good way to map out the location and make sense of it.

STORYBOARD

So the patient walks into the foyer, hands over his appointment card. He takes a seat in the waiting room and is peeved when he sees two different people have abandoned the same crossword. He is then called through to see the dentist. He hands the dentist a photo, and confusedly takes it. She looks at him like he's weird but decides to go along with it. As the patient reclines, the dentist gets her gear on, and comes back to viscously start hacking away and the dude's teeth, it looks pretty sore. After its all done, the patient rinses and spits, and reveals that he got "ECA 2014" written in his teeth. BIG REVEAL.

After displaying the animatic, i was told that i needed to be shorter, that the stuff at the beginning was unnecessary. Which was right. There was no need to establish either the character's uptightness in the waiting room, or the location through the appointment card, as these are already present symbols in the characters outfit and general appearance, and the dentist chair and the dentist. After deciding to cut out these parts, i made the...

ANIMATIC

In terms of SOUND i saw as a tool to further illustrate the actions on screen and to provide more humour, like the glove snap, the over the top drill, the ting with the teeth.
In terms of the song, i really enjoyed the smooth Bossa Nova sound in Omelette, it was so fitting over animation, it just worked, so I searched for a similar sound and came up with "Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - So Danco Samba"

ANIMATION
from the animatic i spent a lot of time mapping the sound to dope sheets, in order to guide the animation, and to keep things synced. This is it half coloured and not yet cleaned up:

 

 

 
2 Characters and a Setting - The Art of Dentistry (UNFINISHED) from Robert Duncan on Vimeo.