Here we go...

O.K. So I set up this Blog in order to keep track of everything related to my production of a short film titled "Cycles" (for now...). This film would essencially be my final project, and its success basically determines where I'll end up in the industry.

If you happen to strand on to this blog, and you don't know me or what Cycles is about, I'll attempt to explain breifly. So when I said industry I meant the feature animation industry. I'm an animation student, going on to my fourth and last year in Pratt institute, brooklyn. My no. 1 passion is drawing and animating traditionally, but as hard as I try, I can't dis 3D animation, because, let's face it, it looks great. And could potentially produce better movies (visually) than any traditionally animated film. I say potentially, because I don't feel that any 3D movie so far, perhaps other than the Incredibles and Nemo, had surpassed Disney's best traditional films such as Pinoccio, Beauty and the Beast, Aladin, the Lion King, Tarzan or Lilo and stitch. Yea. Anyway, so I'm majoring in 3D animation, and Cycles is going to be a CG short, around 3-4 minutes in length.

I started working on the film officially about 6 months ago, but the idea first originated before that. I can remember that night pretty clearly. I was hanging out with a couple of my friends, and one of them, Efrat, who's a graphic designer / crazy artist, showed me one of her works. It was a medical illustration of a man with all his muscles and veins showing - only from the shoulders up. He was lifting his head, his mouth slightly open and his eyes closed, showed from the side. All around him were wonderful juxtapositions of subway maps, with the subway lines converging with the man's veins. The message was shocking and clear - animal man has evolved into something else, more mechanic. Society's noisy roads and subways are like veins in the human body, transporting resources wherever they're needed.

A couple of ideas originated, but one of them in particular cought my attention, as I could see it's enourmous potential, revolving around a homeless guy, who decided on living inside a subway train. This subject is also kinda personal, as I'm riding the infamous G train on a semi-daily basis. If anybody rode said line, you would agree with me saying that there are a lot of strange things going on in that train.

So a homeless guy on the G train, going about, being dellirious and what not. I came up with some crazy illusions he sees a la Requiem for a dream (the mom).. But that wasn't enough. You see too many student films who go along similar lines. After a couple of weeks another idea hit me, following a viewing of the documentary 'Dark Days', which depicts the lives of real mole people in new york. One of the guys there was talking about how his daughter was brutally killed by a gang, which made him lose any intrest he had in living amongst society. I still need to check the statistics, but I'm pretty certain most cases of homeless people are caused by some kind of severe psychological trauma (even if becoming homeless is the direct result of substance abuse, most cases of people deteriorating into doing that had some kind of childhood or family trauma, so indirectly, there's almost always a reason for people to become homeless). I decided my main guy became a perminent resident on the train as a result of his little daughter's trajic death. The story started to connect once I realized what could be the classic cause of her death - she was run over by a subway, when her dad was distracted and didn't pay attention to her: That's why he became a homeless; That's why he lives inside the train; And that's why for the remainder of his life he is to re-experience his own private hell over and over again: the moment his daugher is run over.

In the next post I shall cover the basic story, which is pretty much final, 'cept for a part here and there.