With the art direction decided, I wanted to start working on the story for sweet chilli. I started off by asking myself questions about the story overall; why didn’t the two head chefs get along? what did they need to learn? how could they learn it? These questions helped me to figure out the main beats of the story;

• Two chefs who hate each other would be instructed to make a curry together for a reviewer.
• While making the curry, the girls would disagree on how to do things. Things would take a turn when they refused to let each other add their own respective secret ingredients to the pot.
• The girls would fight, not noticing that the reviewer has arrived.
• The girls would eventually knock each other unconcious, prompting their boss to visit them in the kitchen. He would add both their ingredients to the pot, rushing to get it to the reviewer.
• The girls would be too late to explain what had happened; the reviewer tastes the curry. She likes it, and leaves happily.

After presenting my beats to some of my tutors, they felt that the characters needed a bit more of an incentive to act in the ways that they would; it was proposed to me to raise the stakes of the story by making the review more important. I eventually decided that the review would be to determine whether or not the restaurant is worthy of a ‘golden spoon award’; a Michelin star equivalent that all restaurant owners want. This would give everyone more of an incentive to push for what they think is best; in the end, they all just really want the spoon. It also adds more importance to shallot.

(pictures)

With the main beats figured out, I created a very rough storyboard using post it notes and quick sketches. In this version of the story, the girls are sisters, with a long standing sibling rivalry. They’re eventually instructed by their panic-stricken boss to make a curry for the visiting golden spoon award committee member, determining whether they get the reward or not. After fantasizing about how good they’d look individually after receiving the award, the girls are each determined to do things their own way; they eventually fight while Gobi tries to catch a mouse he spotted in the kitchen, and the story progresses as bullet pointed. I also decided during this time that visually, I’d take inspiration from a mix of video games, computer softwares and comic books for the aesthetic and transitions, adding to the collage feeling of the piece.

Around this time, I also began to consider the sound design for the piece. I knew that I wanted to characters to have an unusual way of speaking, like characters from ‘animal crossing’ video games; something very digital and nonsensical. I initially tried downloading the vocal synthesizer ‘Utau’ to create their voices, but I had trouble navigating it as it’s only available in Japanese; instead, I played around with different settings on a keyboard to gather voices for the characters. As can be heard below; Scoville’s voice is loud and brassy, Saccharose’s voice is like distorted opera singing and Aloo’s voice is based on string instruments. I originally had a voice for Gobi, but I chose to leave him silent.

When I eventually started to storyboard properly on storyboard pro, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to include all of my intended plot points in a 2-5 minute film; I decided to cut the backstory element and leave the girl’s rivalry unexplained, and to cut the mouse character and his subplot completely. This lead to my first storyboard;

• My interim feedback was that the film overall was too long, and that the characters didn’t act very differently to each other. I needed to be more clever with shot composition and pacing to make the film feel less dragged out; the opening was also criticised for being too predictable, as things like establishing shots and zoom ins are used often to start films, despite not always being needed. It was also recommended that I create a floor plan for the restaurant, to understand how the characters moved around in this type of a space. The mix of aesthetics was also a bit incoherent; I should decide on either comic book visuals or video game visuals, not both

• My feedback from my storyboarding class was about the overall composition; I hadn’t used a lot of film language to determine what my shots would look like. I needed to re compose some shots to make them more effective, and this could also make animation easier.

• My feedback from FMP support was more or less the same as the other two, but with more focus on art direction. My tutor felt that the mixed media elements had been included a bit too roughly, and that there needed to be more coherency between the real and drawn textures. The line boiling was also a bit too rough, and the lines were too thick.

• I got similar feedback from a personal tutorial; the fore and backgrounds of the establishing shot could’ve been established more effectively.

The first form of feedback I chose to work on was the backgrounds; I changed the lines on the floor to be less thick than the restaurant, and I changed the buildings in the background to be sketchier and dimmer in colour, establishing them more as buildings behind the restaurant. I re named the restaurant and put a picture of Aloo on the front, so that it was clear he was the boss/owner.

• Some plot points removed; no backstory
• the girls only fight once instead of twice
• overall timing is choppier
• A bit less interaction between shallot and aloo
• More video game inspired

The criticisms this time where;

• The film now felt too fast and the narrative was unclear
• The composition still wasn’t great and some shots were hard to read
• Some criticism on the artwork; the boiling on the background still felt like too much, the kitchens didn’t look too pleasant and the thick lines weren’t working well for them
• Some shots looked a bit complex and hard to animate, such as the long overhead swoosh into the vs screen
• Taking full advantage of my video game aesthetic could save me some animation time and move the story along faster

After receiving this criticism, I once again worked to change things that weren’t working;

With my plan in motion, I was ready to start animating more or less.