God remade in man's image.

So.. Chatting online with singedrac gave me an interesting idea for an animation project. A retelling of various bible stories.

Noah's Arc, for instance. Imagine, instead of the familiar story, we see Noah, a wine grower who maybe drinks a bit too much. He has a drunken hallucination of God telling him to build a ship and adamantly believes it. He begins construction, more or less wrecking his family as he pushes them to build this thing. He drives them, and the denude the hillside of all it's forest to build his arc. However, on the other side of the hill is a loch, and when the rains come, the deforested hillside begins to erode and then suddenly and catastrophically gives way. Noah and his family are swept up in the flood. Noah sees neighbors begging for help but lets them drown, perhaps even pushes them off his boat as they cling to it. They're swept out to sea where he becomes increasingly mad, keeping his family hostage in his delusion that God has decreed him the most worthy of men to live until finally, at last, they land on a deserted island.

Okay, that's just a rough story and it needs work but I think it's got real potential. I wouldn't even have to name the characters so much as make allusions to the biblical story and, in fact, I think that'd actually be better because then it's ambiguous and you're left to think about the meaning of the story.

I think the real problem is that I'd want to do this story in stop-motion and water is not very fun to do in stop-motion. Not sure how I'd deal with that. Also, it requires a lot of props and scenery. I suppose it'd be easier to do in 3D animation but it doesn't seem like it'd feel as dark if I did it in 3D. Hmm. Stuff to think about.

Anyhow, I should take a look at some more bible stories. I suspect there are ways to change them slightly and get new and different moral stories out of them. (This story is working for me because it does have several strong morals to it)

*sigh* No stop-motion until we move though. That in itself will be a hassle. Still, I think this might be a project I really want to spend some time putting together a screenplay and storyboard for.

Folklore

This is vaguely related to the Noah post but has been bubbling in my head for a few weeks now. It's just an odd little thought about story ideas. I feel like, as an american, I'm somewhat robbed of folklore. Most stories americans have are from Europe. There's a few odd ones of course: Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, but all of those are caricatures of people. There's no local version of elves, fairies, pixies, trolls, sprites, etc. We just steal from other cultures. Yes, there is native american lore and some of it I even know. The problem is that you can't do that as a story without people expecting pounding drums and warpaint and you have to say 'Inspired by a Cherokee legend' or something at the beginning. They're not stories that most americans are familiar with. What americans are familiar with are all European legends.

But even European legends would be something. I don't think americans really even have those any more though. They have TV. Cartoons loosely based of legends but often with recognizable and identifable trade-marked characters. We _know_ those legends aren't true and we know that Bugs Bunny will witty mock the wolf rather than cutting him open and filling his belly with hot coals. Legends have become quaint and dated, replaced with aliens and dinosaurs and video game fare. Where in the 1940's everyone likely would have known most Mother Goose rhymes, I doubt more than 10% of children today might know them while 90+% probably recognize the Pokemon theme song.

Culture is a living thing and I don't 'yearn for a more simple time' or anything like that. Just saying that sometimes I feel a little robbed for culture references to work from.

Perhaps I'm just not looking hard enough. Every small town has ghost stories, most of them even have variants of the same sort of story and someone has to have collected those. It would be fun to find some and see if there's anything I could work with as material that hasn't been done to death but many people would recognize without the prefix of, 'Based on american folklore'.

What Dreams May Come

...dreams

I seldom dream. Most of my nights are just black. I wonder if I just don't remember them. Various people have postulated theories that I didn't remember them or that I didn't get enough sleep. Stuff like that. The last few weeks I've had several dreams. I'm left with a couple hypothesis on the nature of why I dream or don't, and it isn't lack of sleep.

It's either that I'm in a phase of careful observation at the moment, and much like someone who considers food utilitarian and doesn't care if it's the same thing they ate yesterday, I think of sleep as utilitarian, so my observation of whether or not I dream is biasing my sample and causing me to dream because I'm actively interested in it. The other likelihood is stress (based on current life situations and common dream content) This one actually seems more plausible becuase I have drempt in the past and often it's related to an issue I'm thinking of at the time but the implication of that is that I've basically been stree-free for 99.8% of the past 5 years. In and of itself, that idea is a bit alarming.

At any rate, recent dreams include: Moving across the country with Stacey to a little place int he woods, moving to the city, living in a filthy apartment crawling with roaches, becoming homeless and being forced to find a home for my cat, knowing that the greasy man I gave her to would eat her but walking away to save myself. Dream about winning the lottery, realizing it's a dream and thinking I can make it real if I can just see the numbers on the lottery ticket and (of course) being woke up by the alarm clock just before I can read the numbers (actually, a series of incidents kept preventing me from looking at the numbers in the dream; probably symbolizing my rational mind saying, 'If you see the numbers, you'll know you're just scamming yourself right now)

A dream about flying. That was sort of interesting. Not in the sense of being weightless or anything, just using physical and mental force to fly. I think this may be my body analyzing skateboard movements. Regardless, it was a fun (if pointless) sort of dream and I'd like to explore it more.

And last night I drempt that I bicycled down a country road to work and after work, I bought a bottle of wine and hid it in a paper bag and sat int he back of the bus drinking it and the bus driver kicked someone else off the bus for drinking and kept eyeing me but I felt paranoid and huddled down behind the seat and ketp drinking. Then some guy started talking to me. I talked to him about my stop motion animation and he revealed that he worked for Nickelodeon and gave me his card, hinting I should call about getting a job. Very weird because 1) I don't want to animate professionally, just do my own thing and 2) from the stories I've heard, Nickelodeon is _NOT_ who you want to work for in the animation world.

So.. I dunno. Strange. Most of these dreams have an oppressive and slightly gritty feel to them. I like that, even though for most people they'd probably be nightmarish. So, whatever the root cause, I hope the persisst for a while. If I've got to waste time sleeping, at least this is mildly entertaining.