A few Ideas (and a wall of text)

Ugh, I hate having to pitch ideas. They never sounds as good as they do in my head. But I guess I have to share some of potential project premises, so here we go.


     (1) A high school kid suffers from chronic nightmares every time he goes to sleep. One day he's in his psych class and begins to doze off after having a night where he refused to sleep at all in order to avoid another bad dream. As his teacher yammers on the kid sees the teacher write the words "lucid dreaming" on the board. Our protagonist then picks up his book and reads through it until he finds it defined in the text. He learns about how when one is fully "lucid" they can control their dreams. He then relizes this is his best bet for conquering his nightmares.
     Later that day he goes home and looks up how to actually attain lucidity, and learns that you need to do things like find symbols you can recognize in your dreams and so on (I really don't want to go into too much detail here, but I'll touch on it in the final project and you can look it up yourself if you want). Basically, this results in him watching cheesy action movies and playing video games as a sort of training. After what I assume I'll cover in a montage, he'll go to sleep and as the monsters that haunt his dreams come out again for another night or torment, he pulls a fast one and becomes some kind of hyper violent badass and decimates everything using the imagery he pulled from the real world (i.e. he uses all kinds of weapons and wire-fu and other ridiculous things). It's cheesy and juvenile, but cathartic and fun.
     I like this one because I think it will give me a chance to play around with humor and action, and since it's animated I can be as free as I want to to exaggerate things and just have fun with it.


(2) Another idea I had revolved around a famous explorer who goes on all kinds of fantastic adventures (think Indiana Jones or Edgar Rice Burrows kind of journeys), but really hates doing so. He'll be asked to find an artifact of some kind and while his sidekick ( I have no idea what to do for this character, I just know the protagonist is going to need a foil of some kind). Past this I really don't have much else thought out. I remember Joe made a comment about my sound edit project  and he mentioned how he thought it was funny the character I had was complaining the whole time even though he was in an exotic, surreal locale. I thought that was a funny observation and decided to expand on that idea a bit more. I guess it would, in a way, be his idea? Yet it was inspired by something I made, so it's still my original idea? Meh, whatever.

(3) I don't have much of an idea here, but doing a project using only non-human characters interests me a lot. Maybe using animals or abstract representations of living things? I'm not sure. Or perhaps doing a project influenced by early human cave paintings? I'm fascinated by that kind of primal art style, but I also kind of feel like Len Lye has already treaded those waters. I'll think more about this later. It's a nice tangent, but I don't have anything concrete enough to work with here just yet.