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Being an indie, projects rarely repeat and you always face new stuff. Solutions and software that may solve a particular set of problems for a given job rarely work for the problems that may crop up in a different gig. Several weeks ago I was trying to figure out photorealistic carnivores for a horror fil, before I was writing a travel script, week before I'm prettifying terrain maps, before that I'm editing a documentary on deaf-blindness in children.
So when I was approached by director-writer Dan Cohen to participate in the production of a trio of "pilot" sketches for a web-centric comedy shorts series, I was both curious and delighted. Comedy is one of the best and hardest challenges there are. Drama, while very challenging, is easy in comparison. In comedy everything has to be just in the perfect proportion to make the magic leap from leaden to airy, from plodding to farcical, from plain and commonplace to laughing matter.
After a reading of the short scripts and after meeting the star of the little farces, called "Berger Time", the character began to develop into the visual world. Dan had written these half-bitter episodes about what a previous generation had called a "born loser". The hapless guy who through his own laziness and lack of principles gets pulled into problems. The character used the star's real life name ?Howard Berger? on a fabricated life of mishaps and misunderstandings.
I hear this name and all I can think of is this hamburger falling... To end not in a bouncy, appetizing settling but in a catastrophic collision. Foodstuff, meet gravity. Gravity, meet foodstuff. Splat!
Production (being Dan and me) likes my image and we go with it. Here is the sketch that sells the idea, although Dan never saw it, as I told him the idea on the phone:
GRAVITY CHECK
Well... CGI is not the best of worlds for arranging collissions between objects, moist or not. Usually, even in a simulation-friendly application, you get into all sorts of pretzels with elasticity and springs and curve networks and other unsavory realities of CGI. All because in a computer things don't really "exist", let alone bounce from each other. In order to do that you need to simulate physics, hairy with equations and coefficients and abcisae. So basically you bite the bullet and start assigning "rigid object" left and right, in your software's dynamics section.
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