Family Research

Last week I had some fantastic feedback from my peers. One of which was about the line itself:

"Oh honey, the only monster within this suburban area is your mother."

This line comes from the father who is comforting his daughter about supposed monsters under her bed. I wrote this to be tongue and cheek, very sarcastic and silly humor. However this did not read well to my peers, it came off as more hurtful. That being said it could be a number of factors such as pacing and line delivery, nevertheless it was worth looking into. I ran it by a number of classes I taught, friends, family numerous individuals with different backgrounds. I am happy to say it was just that specific class that had the wrong impression. There could be a mountain of reasons as to why the class was sensitive to it but it did serve as a fantastic reminder to really dig into the family dynamic.

It would certainly help my scene a lot if I establish what type of family I am working with. After lots of research I decided to use Calvins family from the comic series Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson. The family is chaotic, snarky, sarcastic but also full of love. The father is silly and often times messes with both his son and wife not with cruelty but playfulness.

While the line I wrote seemed to be fine to other parties, I still looked into revising it and came up with a new alternative.

"Honey, the closest thing to a monster is your mother without her coffee"

I believe what makes this alternative an improvement is that it adds reason to why the mother would be a monster. This limits the imagination from cruelty to relatable quirky-ness.

Finally I recorded a lot of video reference. Over 20 videos of different lines and deliveries. I have included one that I will be using for my workflow.

You might notice the positions are swapped between the father (me) and the daughter (a plush of stitch wearing a hat). This is a simple fix in that I will either rearrange my set, or flip the reference video horizontally. There is still a lot to be done however I am excited to say I have blocked out the Maya scene with the rig I will be using.