Urban Follies by Robin (Robbidarobot) - Short, Comedy - In a city of over 10 million people, you’re bound to collide into someone – and some bumps aren’t as pleasant as others.  An unnamed thirsty old Wino waits for his drinking buddy who is late.  This tardiness exposes an unquenchable thirst for something other than booze:  respect.  A quest for respect becomes the journey of a cadre of characters bumping needlessly into one another – many of whom discover that the adventure is just an urban folly. (26 pages) - pdf, format 8)

Thanks for putting this up.  

I plan to start animating (mix of stopmotion, 3D and 2D) this at the end of the year and I think the script needs a bit of tightening up.  

Constructive comments very welcome.

arm me with harmony
R

Figured I'd give this one a read since it had few replies and the description sounded interesting. A few things as I read:

Looks like you repeated a description before & after the opening monologue. Regarding the haiku on page 9, I thought they were 5-7-5, but the one there is 4-6-4.

Overall, there were a few times where the action was hard to picture and I wasn't quite sure where you were going for, and other times where the descriptions did a bit more telling than showing, but since you're animating it yourself I'm sure you have a good enough idea of what you want.

As far as the “each character looking for respect” theme in your tagline, I don’t know if we saw enough of that. It worked with the professor, upset that the wino never conversed with him and also the wino annoyed with every begger but himself making money, though I don’t think he gave any reason for anyone to respect him. I think this theme could have been handled better with the art student and Harold though. Maybe if while the art student was drawing, someone sat beside her and bumped into her sketch pad, causing her to make a mark through her drawing, then have the person say something like, “get a real job like the rest of us” or something equally inconsiderate. For Harold, maybe if someone noticed that he was obsessive compulsive about germs and convinced everyone else on the bus to pretend to cough. Also, I think the professor could’ve used a line about how the students never respect him, something like “I just went over haikus and not a single person knows how to write one.”

I also liked how all of the action took place, kind of a metaphor for life’s journey and the snags we all hit along the way.

To me though, the script seemed kind of hollow. I’m not sure if there’s enough thematically, unless you were aiming more for pure entertainment. I think it’d help if you tried to give the characters a few more ways to show how they want respect but can’t seem to find it, or maybe it’s more obvious and I’m just up too late to make intelligent critiques.

Wait for a few more comments. Like I said, maybe it's just me. I should mention though that I'd be very interested in seeing the animation once it's completed. A lot of the action in the script will work better visualized and I think it'd be entertaining and maybe pull everything together for me. Best of luck!

Hey Robin,

I enjoyed each of the shorts that you put together into this script.  It kind of reminded me of a Jacques Tati movie (you familiar with Tati?) the way he puts together life’s snippets, but it was a bit grittier than Tati movies usually get.

Since you are doing your own thing here and even producing it yourself, any comments I could make about formatting or even your descriptions would be kind of useless, though I didn’t have much to say about either of those anyway.

What I was missing here was some way to tie all these stories together.  I didn’t really find that in the script.  It was like a bunch of separate beads, rather than a necklace.  I think you need some kind of unifying force here, something that gels this into a single story.

I noticed this was an episode so you may be aiming for something like that over the course of a series.  I didn’t really get a sense that you were, but what you are writing is different enough that I can’t really be certain where it is headed.

Good luck with doing the animation and I look forward to viewing it once you are done.

Cheers,

Michael      

Hey mcornetto & bobtheballa,

Thanks so much for your comments.

You provided the exact info I needed to tighten this up b4 we go to storyboard.  This is the first in a series of five shorts.

(Yes I know Tatl!)

As for the haiku, the translation from Japanese doesn't lend itself to 5-7-5.  So I left it.

arm me with harmony
R