I just want you to understand I'm not trying to be a dick or anything...lemme show you why I'm not diggin' this.
At 10/31/09 11:48 PM, FatKidWitAJetPak wrote:
Angrily he approached the front door and banged at it... ~ ...man wearing black leather boots.
Instead of setting up the conflict, so the story tells itself in a fashion that the audience can follow right along from beginning to end, the audience is watching a situation unfold that seems to have already established the conflict and the character's motivations earlier. Counting off in my head, the river guy comes in twenty seconds in, so it could be around this time that things should start getting clearer...maybe introduce the character, explain why he's pissed off, and who's house this is in the field that he takes great interest in.
Additionally, it could've helped your story if you pitched it by establishing what the guy that's banging on the door looks like. Even with how he's dressed could shed some light on who he is, or hint at what he's after.
"Rick? About time I found you! What the hell are you doing?" Rick stood motionless, staring into the roaring waves of the river... ~ ...The man stood with a gun in his hand, one bullet missing from the clip. It was the same gun that Rick had given him earlier to use for protection.
First off, roaring waves of a river? It's a river; not a beach. Secondly, how could it visually establish that one bullet is missing from the clip, and how does the audience know that Rick was given the gun earlier for protection? That only concretes my opinion that we were given something that's already had all this backstory, and the audience isn't seeing shit of it. It's true, Quentin Tarentino set up similar scenarios, but they always had a pay-off. Like...step back and see this from afar for a second; guy is pissed off. Wants inside a house that nobody occupies at the moment. See's Rick chilling by the river. Tries to get Rick's attention, and Rick spins around spitting off an expository monologue while wielding a knife and cursing like a Deadite madman.
With all of the cursing going on that doesn't have a clear backing, or a pre-established reason why he's going off on this guy, it comes off as juvenile instead of scary. I can tell that you're trying to make this shocking because Rick saw something so incredibly fucked up that he's acting out of character, but for the audience, this is our first impression of the character, so we're left to assume he's just a crazy asshole with a knife.
The sun set in the sky and the man dropped the gun to the ground. He screamed into the dark blue air and beat his fist against a tree. "God Dammit Rick. God dammit." He began to cry. The tears rolled down his dirty cheeks and fell into the puddle of blood against his feet. He walked beside the river not knowing where he was headed. The sun disappeared behind the horizon, and darkness filled the sky.
Wait, what? He shoots Rick out of self defense, punches a tree, and mourns his (apparently, because we're left to assume) friend for a whopping ten seconds at most, and just leaves him there while he takes a nature stroll? Again, our first impression of Rick is he's a crazy asshole with a knife. This right here only downplays his death even further...like it's no big deal, even though a guy just got shot.
He walked along the riverbank. The river was going very fast. The ripples in the water bubbled and turned and followed the man into the night. The trees around him stood motionless. There were millions of stars visible in the sky yet the moon was nowhere to be found. The man paid no attention to these surroundings. He just stared at his feet while walking to nowhere. He felt nothing. No emotions. No grief, fear, hope, happiness, just nothingness.
Why.
He stared into his reflection in the river and kicked it with his scraped feet.
I thought the river was going so fast the water was frothy and bubbly...this is inconsistent.
A loud screech interrupted his thoughts.
What kind of a screech? Just like above with "A loud noise" could've just as easily been "A gunshot" and just got right to the point. Noir doesn't mean you have to make everything vague. :P
He spun around and looked towards the direction of the violent noise. Another screech sounded, this time much louder and coming from another direction. He looked and saw nothing. It was too dark to tell. He stared into the trees behind him. A large figure emerged from the woods.
It snarled and gasped. Its feet pierced the ground and twisted and churned. Its body vibrated, its stomach opened and closed, and it moaned a loud roar into the night air. The man's heart beated and his blood flowed. He started to shake. Then their eyes met. The shadow stared at the man and leaped its arms forward. The man ran. He ran as fast as he could and didn't look back. The sound of a thousand nightmares followed him. It dug into the ground and launched through the night air, piercing its throbbing claws into the man's back. The man gasped for air as blood dripped down his face. He fell sideways and they went into the raging river.
It was at this moment that I began questioning how this is, in any way, related to Lady Noir.
The river bubbled and rolled their bodies violently past shadows running on the bank. Black dots and bubbles engulfed his thoughts. His lungs filled with water and his hip bone shattered against a rock. He twisted and turned under the water. The black shadow that hunted him in the night disappeared in the water behind him. He passed out.
You're describing things that would be good for a book. How are you going to express this visually in animation? Moreover, I hope you realize how incredibly difficult it is to animate water, even if it is in black in white. So the animator is going to have to draw out
-Black dots and bubbles engulfing his thoughts.
-His lungs filling with water
-his hip bone shattering against a rock, which is presumably submerged.
The man hurled down the river. His body turned and toiled. He came to the waterfall...
...There's a waterfall near this wheat field from before?
...and fell out into the cold night air. He did not fall downwards, however, because there was no ground below him. The waterfall went out into space. He floated out into the black abyss as droplets of water and blood followed his shredded body. The floating island grew smaller behind him. Soon it was just a speckle in the endless sea of darkness. His body turned to ice and shattered in the cold blackness of space. Nothing could be seen other than the black marbles of the dark.
...........Again, there's really nothing coherent with this...it's all incredibly random, poorly established, senseless brain fart. It's not so much "Noir" as it is a "Sam Raimi-ish horror short" and there's no Lady Noir at all...not even a feminine figure who could be interpreted as Lady Noir, and even if there was, it would be mismatched. We got cities and guns, cities and guns, cities and guns, and then we got wheat-fields and Man Bear Pig in the shadows.
It would be interesting as a standalone project....and checking out Crocker's stuff, it'll be neat getting him to do something other than hentai...but for some of the things you've written in this synopsis, they need time to flesh out and leave an impact with the audience, otherwise an already bewildering and random chain of events are going by so fast, that not only will the audience become confused, but they eventually give up, and stop trying to understand.
Keep this project, don't throw it away...but those are my two cents.
