The death of Mr. Happy

These last four days have been very enjoyable, I feel that we have a very balanced and motivated group each with their own ideas and ways of working. I think altogether, we managed to put our differences to good use and work together towards something that was unachievable on our own.

Our letter was 'O' - we had many ideas, one of which was how the world wouldn't function without 'O' as a shape, i.e. wheels would not exist, the earth would be flat or some strange cubed or irregular shape, and probably most importantly there would be a Mr.Men genocide as most of them are round.

After some discussion we started talking about how the 'oh' shape is used in many words in the mouth especially expressions i.e. 'oh', 'yo' 'nooooooo!!', yawning, etc. and we decided to make our presentation a 2 minute film that would depict how boring and lifeless our lives would be without the letter 'o'.

This is our main character, the film is a 'day-in-the-life-of' style film, and the audience is invited to follow him around as he carries out his day-to-day business i.e. waking up, getting ready, walking to work and going out to a club in the evening. The first half is what his life without the letter 'o' in his life, and the second shows how much better it is with the letter 'o' present.




The speech bubbles are some of our props that we are using. The films sound content is mainly music and sound effects has no speech therefore we will be using these to express speech, its especially effective when highlighting words that have an 'o' sound. The image on the right contains development (doodles) of what to write on the speech bubble during the scene where the main character gets frustrated when he is trying to to his work on his office computer but can't use the letter 'o'.

To create a certain affect of lifelessness and gloominess on the scenes that required it we decided to put a colour effect to give it the required atmosphere and mood. 'The Matrix' used a green hue to give their film both a futuristic feel and as a nod to old computer technology where computer screens were black and green, a digital sci-fi feel. To give ours the feel we wanted we used a grey/blue hue to simulate the feeling of when you look out the window on the morning of a miserable day.



For the soundtrack we wanted something bleak and eerie... a sound similar to waking up in the morning after a night out with ringing still in your ears. I played around with some guitar feedback found at the begging of the song 'Pulse' by 'Pelican', cutting about 2 seconds of it and putting it on a loop. Here is a preview of the result.

Preview One

I played around with the tone to give it a deeper, more drawn out tone,

Preview Two


We would have this in the foreground and light sound effects of the character interacting with his environment in the background.