So,
The Outsider has been selected as the story to adapt for the Labor Day Project. I think we’re all agreed that we want a modern adaptation of the story, so it will be necessary to dispense with the castles and such. Beyond that, I think the theme of being an “outsider” is always ripe for a short story. Most audiences can connect the feeling. As a result of everyone’s familiarity, though, we must be that much “dead on” and must avoid too much cliche (though it will be inevitable given the source material).
For work each morning, when I’m actually home in Austin, I park in a nine-story parking garage, take a barren concrete and steel stairwell down to the ground floor, then walk through a dirty alley to reach my office. Many times I have noticed the emptiness and solitude of this path, even though it sits in the middle of the city (intersection of Sixth and Congress for those who know Austin).
So, this morning as I was walking my route, it made me think of the narrator from The Outsider walking around his castle alone. The high concrete walls around me, the asphalt under foot, the valleys formed between the office buildings, the dank puddles of rainwater. The setting seemed appropriate, comparable. The stairwell of my parking garage also felt like the long dark tower the narrator climbs to escape his castle.
The scenes that popped into my head showed the narrator walking through a city, through its alleys, across its streets, its parking lots, its garages. Over the shots of the narrator would be his narration, mirroring the sentiment expressed in the original story. The audience would watch as the narrator goes through his daily routine, moving through a city empty of its populace (think 28 Days Later or Vanilla Sky).
The narrator would finally discover a door he had not noticed before on the side of a building in an alleyway he had not seen before. Making his way in, the narrator would travel up flight after flight of stairs (queue nice Vertigo stairwell homages). He would eventually emerge somewhere, the top of a building or out the side of a different building at street level (echoing the original story’s emergence of the narrator into another world).
Once in this new world, the narrator realizes he is different from everyone else (not sure yet how we show this or in what way he is different). I guess an important aspect of the original story is that the narrator is afraid of who he really is, that he’s actually a “horror” even though he doesn’t feel that way. Like in Frankenstein: the lonely monster. I would assume the ending note of the short would still be that he is alone in either world, destined to be that way — tragedy?
Rolin, since your expertise would lean this direction, do you have any desire in roughing out a script? If not, I’m sure we can rought one out through committee. Regardless, I’d be curious of your initial opinion of a rough length for expressing the story. It feels to me like it could be done in under five minutes, which would be a nice time to work with. Any recommendations would be great.
Heath, you mentioned not wanting the final work to be fully animated. I would agree. In fact, the stylistic look I’m wanting to put forward would be primarily photographic, particularly considering that the story is largely concerned with a single character. I think photographic backgrounds, particularly high-resolution photographs taken by a pro (Bennett) with a professional camera could help emphasize the reality of the scenario and emptiness of the world, while rotoscoping the character could keep the story surrealistic (and allow us some leeway in how the character is represented without having to get into make-up effects).
One idea that came to mind while writing this was simply having the narrator blacked out through most of the scenes (or throughout the entire short). This may be a bit over the top, but could be interesting. I’m thinking here of a perfect black outline around the character. In fact, the black would specifically be “true black” such that it looked like a whole punched in the film.
From a practical standpoint: obviously, the locations for the city are all readily available in Austin. Since you guys will be here over a holiday weekend we could definitely get plenty of “empty street” shots in the early mornings. We can also take multiple shots and recomposite them with cars and people removed. Bennett, you’d just need to bring your favorite digital SLR and lenses. For video, we could use my Sony DV camera if all the characters are going to be rotoscoped.
The workflow, as I was discussing with Heath last night, would generally follow: we show up at a location, photograph our shots with the digital SLR, then video the actor(s) with as close a camera setup as possible to the photographs. If we want to do shots with a moving camera then we’d need to plan how to decompose it into photographs for the background plate, i.e. for pans you take a panoramic photograph (or multiple regular photos that are stitched together in post).
Once we do all the live-action components (principal photography) we shift to post. In post, I would generate a single Photoshop file (PSD) for each frame of the video footage that will be rotoscoped. We then open each frame in Photoshop, ink/trace the rotoscoped characters, then paint the characters. We would likely divide this task among several of us as it will be very labor intensive. Bennett, do you still have your Wacom tablet? I have one, and Ben (Austin friend) has one as well if we want to bring him on post (he’s interested). I know none of us are classically trained animators, but it is largely tracing, and Ben, Jenny (Ben’s girlfriend) and Elizabeth all have above average drawing skills (Ben and Jenny have art degrees). Inking and painting are separate tasks, all of us would be able to do the painting in Photoshop.
While rotoscoping the characters we can also focus on cleaning up the backgrounds. This is more of a traditional photo-retouching that Bennett and I are both familiar with doing in Photoshop. We likely additionally make the images more stylized, which would involve simplifying color schemes, cleaning up texture, selectively exaggerating contrast, adding additional elements through photo-montage. This last bit could be very interesting in that it would give us a lot of creativity as far as how our environments look. For example, we could transform the Austin cityscape into a unique cityscape, or an impossibly desolate one, or an infinitely tall one. Since these are largely non-animated backgrounds they could have incredible detail.
Once the characters have been rotoscoped and backgrounds completed they all get composited together. At this point, some additional compositing work is done in scenarios where you have foreground photographic objects that overlap rotoscoped characters. It will also be necessary to add some secondary animations to the backgrounds to keep them from looking too static. Additionally, it may be necessary to reintroduce shadows and reflections of the rotoscoped characters.
The final step for the visuals would be letterboxing and filmgrain (if desired). A nice aspect of combining photographic background plates with rotoscoping is that we can work at film resolution (actually, beyond). It also means that we our shots before film grain can be as clean and sharp as 35mm photography. Once we transfer them to DVD (our first distribution medium) we’ll have something that will look distinctly better (cleaner, sharper, better color reproduction) than any DV-shot video. Also, if we had any sort of success with this and had a desire (and financing) to up it to 16mm or 35mm for festival entry we could take advantage of the full resolution available (~4K x 4K compared to ~0.75K x 0.5K for regular DV).
Heath was asking for some examples of rotoscoping… I couldn’t really find any that looked like what I’m envisioning. Most of the examples are traditional animation (Snow White in Disney’s Snow White, any of Ralph Bakshi’s work). I’ll try to put together a test shot this week to show you guys. I’ll also put together some location shots of the downtown areas I described above.
