“In and Out”

“IN – OUT” – a 3D animated short film.

In-Out is a humorous story told completely through character animation that seeks to capture the emotions of its mouth-less office mate protagonists solely through their eyes and body language. While the characters may lack a voice, both physically and metaphorically, the challenge of the piece is to communicate clearly to a universal audience.

Two characters (“Stan” and “Ollie”) sit at opposing desks in an office, where they work in a dystopian nightmare. Large tubes suspended over their heads dump papers into their In Box; each co-worker must look the paper over, perform some meaningless calculations, then transfer it into an Out Box, whereupon it is immediately sucked back up – and re-deposited in the opposing character’s In Box. Ollie is preternaturally efficient at this task, which means that Stan has an enormous pile in his In Box that he can never hope to clear out. To make things worse, the wall is covered with Employee of the Month plaques featuring Ollie every single month, a fact which he gloats about. Things come to a head when Stan accidentally drops his pencil in his Out Box. It gets transferred over to Ollie, who is less than helpful in returning it. Tensions escalate into an all-out paper war, which gets inadvertendly resolved by a fortuitous discovery, and a new Employee of the Month is born.

The characters and environment will be completely 3D, heavily stylized, using a non-photorealistic rendering style such as a toon shader. While character animation will be at the heart of the piece, it will also draw on my skills in other aspects of 3D production. My intention is to deliver a piece that appears understated, drawing on a “less is more” philosophy, but achieving this will still require enormous attention to detail, both in the actions of the characters, the camera movements, and the textures and lighting. An original score will accompany the action.

Verbal Storyboard

We open on a rollercoaster ride at breakneck speeds through a network of duct-like tubes. Pieces of paper fly past, briefly lingering in front of the camera to reveal the opening titles printed on convoluted-looking forms. As the titles end, the camera and some paper emerge from a tube that dangles over an In Box, already piled dangerously high with a disheartening quantity of paper.

Reveal Stan, the unfortunate office worker belonging to the pile. He steadfastly punches numbers on a calculator, checking the totals against a piece of paper he is reviewing. An insert of the paper reveals it to be “Painfully Complicated Form DZ-105 – For Redundant Review.” Stan “sighs” as he finishes the form and transfers it to his out box. An identical tube situated above the out box sucks the piece of paper straight up. Stan reaches for the next piece of paper off the pile and readies himself for another set of calculations. He pauses to look across the desk, where another set of tubes dangle above another desk facing Stan’s – identical, except that the in box is empty. As a form emerges from the opposite in tube – the same form that Stan just completed – a hand snatches it from mid-air. Reveal Ollie, Stan’s nemesis, furiously punching his way through the form on his calculator with super-human speed. Stan looks on wearily as Ollie completes his task and whips the paper into his out box. A moment later, the paper is once again deposited onto Stan’s endless pile.

Stan and Ollie regard each other a moment, and for the first time we see the full setup of the two enormous solid desks, the matching tubes and boxes, and a shared wall which is covered in plaques. Ollie gives a nod toward the wall, and Stan glances over. We now see one of the plaques up-close – it is an “Employee of the Month” plaque, featuring Ollie, looking dour. The camera tracks to the next plaque, also Ollie, with the same pose and facial expression. This repeats again and again, accelerating into a blur, and it becomes clear that Ollie has been Employee of the Month every month for years. The camera returns to Ollie, with the same flat expression as in all the portraits. However, he tauntingly cocks an eyebrow at Stan.

Stan is upset, but resigned. He resumes work on his form, stabbing at his calculator with mute rage. Suddenly, the pencil slips from his hand; he watches in slow-motion as the pencil twists through the air and lands in his Out Box, and before he can channel his horror into action, it is sucked dramatically up the tube. He looks across the way as it comes out a moment later into Ollie’s Out Box. Ollie reaches for the pencil and eyes it distastefully, then glances at Stan. An embarrassed Stan leans forward and reaches out, requesting his pencil. Rather than hand it to him, Ollie lazily drops it forward; it rolls loudly across and drops irretrievably into the gap between the two desks. Stan looks up in shock at Ollie, who puts up his hand in a “whoops” gesture that is blatantly insincere. Stan, stunned and hurt, takes the form he was using, and with a moments hesitation, flings it into his out box. Ollie, without moving, snatches it contemptuously as it comes down on his side.

Something in Stan snaps. He slowly stands up from his chair, reaches up and tugs at his out tube. It slackens, giving him enough length to pull it over to his huge in box pile. Ollie does a double-take as he realizes what is about to happen, as Stan uses the tube to instantly vacuum up his entire pile in one shot. Paper starts pouring rapid-fire into Ollie’s in box. Ollie doesn’t take it sitting down; he grabs the tube, tugs it down and aims it like a bazooka at Stan. Stan holds up the out tube in defense, and as the two combatants lean in at each other, the tubes suddenly fly out of their hands and snap together. An ominous rumbling fills the office, and both of them brace for the worst. Yet after a moment, the sound settles down, and they look up to see the two tubes stuck together, paper now endlessly cycling through them all by itself. Stan and Ollie look at each other, smiling as realization slowly dawns upon them. We zoom out as the two office mates sit back at their desks, feet up in their boxes, a few last papers lazily drifting down.

Coda: we see the office one month later. The desks are dusty and there are cobwebs on the still-connected, slightly vibrating tubes. On the shared wall is a single, shiny “Employees of the Month” plaque – it features a photo of both Stan and Ollie in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses, smiling.

Motivation

Much of the inspiration for this idea was drawn from personal experience. I’ve always had an antipathy for bureaucracies, and instinctively rebel against tasks performed for no justifiable reason. Even showing my receipt to the security guard on my way out of K-Mart so he can make an irrelevant scribble on it with a cheap pen fills me with an unreasonable, seething anger. In addition, I struggled for a long time to discover my field of interest, and in the process of that discovery I worked a lot of unsatisfying jobs. The mindless temp jobs were bad enough, the “mindful” jobs even worse, totally devoid of meaning. I also grew up in Manhattan, where a majority of people are engaged in essentially very abstract work, buying, selling and trading things that they never see or touch. I think as a kid, something resonated when I read Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and he described in the introduction one of the fundamental problems with our planet:

“Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.”

At some point during my own unhappy vocational experiences, I drew a cartoon that symbolized how I felt at the time about the meaning of most modern day jobs. It featured a man sitting at a desk with a tube spitting paper into an in box, another tube sucking paper from an out box, and an illuminated sign on the wall like those seen at a crosswalk, saying “Work / Don’t Work.” Several years later, when casting about for ideas for an animated short, I came across the cartoon again. I imagined a worker in this situation, with the pace gradually accelerating, until in a feat of desperation he connected the two tubes, and realized that in doing so he’d basically freed himself by eliminating the middleman. I drew out a cartoon storyboard for the concept, but put it aside for a while because I felt that the one character story was a bit stagnant. I went back to it months later, and started imagining how the dynamic might shift if there were two characters, and that led directly to the idea as it exists now.

There have been several cultural works that influenced this story, the most obvious being the movie Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam. Though I’d only seen the movie once in high school (and it being 3 am, I slept through much of it), many of the images stuck in my head, particularly the tiny, gray windowless offices with the high ceilings, and the obsessive treatment given to bureaucratic processes. It was only recently that I went back to view the film and realized that I’d been unconsciously influenced more heavily than I realized. In a scene late in the film, the main character struggles in his office with a set of pneumatic tubes that keep depositing capsules with paperwork in his office. Every time he completes a form and puts it back, another immediately emerges. The pace quickens, until finally he grabs a length of hose from the wall and shoves each end up the tubes. The resulting “short-circuit” causes an explosion, and paper rains down in the building. When I saw this I almost abandoned the project, but decided that my version of events was different enough to make it worth telling. However, to signify the homage I’ve slipped a Brazil reference into the piece as an “inside joke.”

The other film to influence this project is The Hudsucker Proxy, by Joel and Ethan Coen. The various levels of bureaucratic absurdity in the Hudsucker Corporation are hilarious, from the dark and chaotic mailroom to the accounting department, consisting of rows upon rows of identically dressed, bespectacled businessmen with adding machines who repeatedly look up to consult the gigantic signs hung above their desks reading “What Will This Cost?”

I always approach animated works with the question, “Why is this animated, rather than live action?” Usually, if there is no good answer, the piece isn’t very good either. I believe it’s important for an artist to take advantage of the medium they’ve chosen for their art, and the best works so fully embrace their medium that they could not be realized any other way. While it would be relatively easy to place two actors in an office, I’ve chosen to design my characters with no mouths, for several reasons. I’m seeking to challenge and showcase my character animation skills with this work, and the lack of mouths means that all the emoting and acting will have to be done through body language and subtle eye expressions. The character design also has a metaphoric purpose, in that Stan and Ollie are office drones, expected to mutely obey the dictates of their pointless jobs. Lastly, I want to tell a story that is universal, and I’ve always found the most powerful stories are those that communicate without language. By using the medium of animation, I can create characters that fully embody these concepts in a way that would otherwise be unattainable.

Production Process

The project will be built, animated and rendered in Alias Maya. I will probably use Mental Ray for the render to take advantage of effects like subsurface scattering and/or toon shading. Early experiments with these technologies have proved very promising. While I originally intended to use Maya’s Hair system on both characters, I’ve grown to like the crude polygonal hair on my proxy models, and may take the low-tech route instead. However, I’m confident that I can pull off the higher-tech solution if it better suits the style of the piece. Ultimately, though it may be stylized, I want the piece to be clearly 3D, with a very solid and believable feel.

The piece will be created in a 1:33 aspect ratio, since I’m expecting the majority of viewers will see it on a standard television. However, I still have festival hopes, so I’m composing each shot so that it can be cropped horizontally to a 1:85 ratio and still be effective. I’ve already gotten a professional composer on board with the project, and will work with him to score the piece from the animatic early in the term.

The biggest challenge facing me is organization and motivation. There are currently about 45 shots in total, and I’m anticipating the final version of the piece will come in at just under 3 minutes in length, which is a lot for a solo animation project in the given timeframe. In order for this to be achievable, I’ve done as much pre-production work as possible. As of this treatment, I have completed character designs and modeling, primary rigging, and a 3D animatic. I’ve also gotten some invaluable experience in short film production during the fall term in the Digital Bauhaus class, where I served as story creator, animator and technical lead. The knowledge I gained from that class has guided me in constructing the production pipeline for this project, and while I will undoubtedly discover new problems and pitfalls, I can hopefully avoid repeating many others.

Most importantly, while I’ve repeatedly told myself how much easier it would be to do a simple 30-second thesis, I’ve continued to pursue this project because I really want to do it. It’s already motivated me to work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, putting in a full term’s worth of pre-production on top of an already full class schedule. I am confident that it will drive me to finish it to my satisfaction -- and on time.