Notes from 6/18/2011

Overview

-Brief Updates
-Brainstorming


Brief Updates

There's been no response yet from the DigiPen staff about fundraising for Reel Worth, nor has there been a response back from my friend about hosting our site. The Reel Worth issue we'll have to wait on, but it might be time to start looking for other alternatives for the Robojams website. I'm going to do some shopping around for hosting packages. Also, Gerritt mentioned that his father might have some extra server space we could use. He is going to look into that and give us an update next meeting.


Brainstorming

Today we talked a bit more about setting. I brought in some pictures of various bus stops. Several people echoed the opinion that they like the more modern architecture look, and that we should use that for the design of the bus stop. Also, Chase mentioned that he thought it would be cool if the bus stop was in a more urban environment, as opposed to being in a suburb. This way, we could use other contextual clues in the environment to show the passage of time, such as the changing of storefront displays. One of the concerns brought up was finding a way to add more of an urban setting without flattening out the staging. Many bus stops in a downtown area simply have a building placed behind them - essentially a wall that would remove the element of depth from the scene. If we could find a way to place the bus stop in a city-like setting while still retaining spacial depth, we could have the best of both worlds. How do we do this?

Some other character concepts for the animal mask dude were shown as well. We have a lot of good mask options to choose from. I proposed that, for the next meeting, we should compile the concepts we have and make decision about which animal mask we want to go with. I don't want to rush this, and we should all be happy with the one we decide upon, but I think we have a lot of great options already and I could see this being an area that gets drawn out unnecessarily. Next meeting will narrow down the choices and hopefully find one that we can all agree on.

As for story, there were no concrete new ideas, though it was suggested that one of the scenarios could involve an incident where the main character (MC) tries to sabotage the animal mask dude (AM) to destroy his popularity. AM would do something by accident that would totally sabotage MC's plan while making him even more popular.

The vignettes would play out very much like a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon. We have these brief interactions that would always play out in AM's favor, and each one tells us something about the relationship between them, as well as their relationships with the other bus stop people. When coming up with more vignette ideas, use the "Roadrunner" framework as a jumping off point.

We also talked briefly about some fun things we could do with the short, such as placing ourselves in the scenes as extras waiting at the bus stop. Also, coming up with a type of easter egg that we could start putting in all the pieces we do.

Finally, we decided to switch our meetings to a bi-weekly basis. Our meetings of late haven't been as fruitful, and it was proposed that we space our meetings out so that we'd have more to share and talk about when we actually do meet.


**OUR NEXT MEETING WILL BE TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY ON SATURDAY, JULY 2nd, 4PM AT VICTOR'S COFFEE. PLEASE BE ON TIME AND BRING WHATEVER MATERIALS ARE NEEDED TO SHARE YOUR IDEAS.**