A number of considerations went into the development of the script for “Prince Harming to Prince Charming”. Some of them we will touch on here and many of the considerations you will read in other parts of our blogs. Right from the beginning we knew we had to make the script appealing to “Tweens” and “young at heart” adults. Those were our target audience, & was never meant to be short for kids. Another thing, we wished to have is a social message embedded in the script. “Educating and empowering the GIRL child” tugs the most at Mark’s heart’s strings. He insisted on having it part of the story and the team obliged him by making it part of the script.
The initial draft of the script was created by Mark, Pablo (Pablo Vasquez), Milli which leaned more towards the social cause with the 4 main characters (a turkey, a peacock, a peahen, an albino peacock). After a month of the initial draft, Robin joined the team. We gave Robin the initial draft (which looked more like a few sequence titles and bullet point lists) and a 1 hour phone conversation on the story concept. we challenged Robin to create plot sequences rathen than any extra characters to support the story. This greatly reduces production time, by eliminating modeling and rigging extras for the short. He lived up to the challenge and delievered his first draft. Robin gave us an initial draft script, that had a single extra character, the turkey’s father and the entire story was told in the plot sequence.
Another rule of thumb was, if the character occupied less than 30 seconds of screen time, we are going to try our best replace the character or increase the character time in the story. We had sent the story to Bassam Kurdali (Director of Elephant’s Dream) to hear his thoughts on it. Bassam, if you meet him person, is a very funny guy (but his work tends to be on the darker side), he reminded us of the 30 second rule, when he stated you need to remove the turkey’s father and replace it with something else. He also advised us to apply the same rule for albino peacock and change it into a book, with terrible advise. When Bassam speaks we listen and made the recommended changes to the present final draft of the script. Hopefully, there will only be a very tiny bit of changes as forced by the storyboarding and animatic process, to go on with the production.
Emily Cawthon, Robin Trombley, Miyi Millili, working on PH2PC (Mark taking the picture)
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