script for descendants
The task of writing an exiting story
[only available in english so far]
This is the "directors-stuff" content of the CGTalk making of Descendants.
As an animation student at the Animationsinstitut for Visual Effects and Digital Postpuroduction at the Filmakademie Baden Württemberg you are "confronted" with a lot of people who teach you how to write a script. I actually say "confronted" because writing a good script is a tough task and often underestimated. The professors at my university really pushed me hard to think about what i am writing and I listened to seven professional screenwriters during my time at the Filmakademie.
If you really want to make a good movie focus on three important things first: The story, the story and the story. Because it will affect all the production processes INCLUDING the post production. I thought writing about screen writing here is a good way to point to the core of moviemaking because in our days a lot of people tend to focus on fancy effects more than on what they actually want to say in the story.
How to begin?
When i write a screenplay i first have a setting in mind. A vague idea of what is going on and who is involved. On this point i stop thinking about the beginning of the film, i stop thinking about how the characters look, who or how they are and what they do in the movie. What i actually do, is to think about a surprizing ending of the film.
The power of "reverse writing"
Well, you might ask... how do you think about an ending if you do not have all the action before. Thats not tough to answer. You think about something TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE that will happen in the end and put the setting and the characters that you already have into it. Then you "just" invent the stuff that is not there but that has to be there to make the ending work. Then you write the story from the END to the BEGINNING. I will explain this in detail but to do so, i need to put a lot of spoilers about "descendants" in this text. So if you did not see the movie yet, and do not want to have your suspension wasted, do not read any further.
How to write "reverse"?
Imagine you leaving your house. You NEVER do it without a reason. Even if you just go on a random walk you NEVER leave your house without a plan in mind. On a random walk your plan would be "I go around just to relax." You might end up in a supermarket or in the park, but your goal is to relax. Without this plan you would not leave your house. Humans tend to do nothing without a plan. What applies to daily behaviour also applies to screenwriting. If you have a good and suprizing and really not forseeable ENDING, then you always have a motivation to think about something. You would not start to tell a joke without knowing the ending, right? The crazier, the better! This differs a lot from the "know your ending priciple" because you not only know it, but you construct it in the most complex way possible first and then write the story backwards.
Now that the basic idea is clear i will start to explain how i did it in descendants.
The turn happens at the very end!
Ok. What i am talking about here is the kind of "6th Sense" film, as i call it. A film that totally changes what you saw so far only by how the story ends. In the end of "Descendants" a flower and a deer "conceive descendants". Impossible, right? Well, no. In an animation film you can make everything possible. But because everything is possible nothing is allowed to be arbitrary. I thought, ok... how do a flower and a deer conceive descendants. The answer is: the deer has to decompose and on the spot where it does, the flowers grow. Thats not actual "descendants" but a kind of a "methaphor". Good enough! To decompose the deer, it first has to die. How do we kill it? With poison. Ok. Does our main character kill it with poison? Well no, because we want a sweet story here and not "American Pyscho". So we have to have another poisonous character. Check! Next question: "Why the hell would a flower want to conceive descendants with a deer?" Answer is: It wont! It happens "accidentally". For the audience it makes no difference if some cool thing happens according to the plan or accidentally, what matters is, that it happens. BUT! NOT WITHOUT A PROPPER SETUP. So we need to setup this: I used the poisonous character to set it up: The newly invented "red flower". I will explain this later.
Attraction
First we have to introduce another function of the film: The "descendants conceiving" flower needs to be attracted somehow to the deer because otherwise none of this would make any sense at all. Why would a flower want to accidentally conceive descendants with a deer if it is not the least attracted to it. Well, what attracts us is easy to tell: What we do not have but consider beeing useful. The most basic thing that a flower would obviously consider as useful is: moving around. Cool. The flower can't, the deer can. The white flower wants to move around. She wants that because she is sick of standing at the edge of a clearing and wants to be in the sun. Just like the deer is. She sees the deer on a clearing and wants to be just like it. (also this brings us to a nice payoff in the end of the film! The white flower says in the beginning of the movie "I want into the light! The fact that she is dying, and reborn where the deer was, gives her actually the possibility to MOVE a bit: onto the clearing and into the light. Nice payoff too! Very hidden, but it is there.)
The setup of our strange ending
So! How do we bring the "descendants"-thought into the film to set up our impossible ending without having the white "naive" flower wanting it? Well, we have a poisonous character. She has the "idea". Easy right? We set up a scene where the white flower is staring at the deer. And tells the red flower that she wants to move around. The red flower has to tell the white flower, that actually a deer is no friend of flowers but a "predator"! And that if that deer comes near her it will actually eat it, not "carry you around in his mouth to show you the world!" as she states. And she ironically adds:"... and then, on a warm morning in spring, he'll conceive descendants with you, on a dew laden meadow. A whole bunch of deer flowers."
"Oh really?" says the white flower (liking the idea). "No..." answers the red. "He'll eat you, end of story." Here the white flower sets the final setup. She tells the red that she'd rather be dead, be eaten by the deer and therefore a part of it, running through its blood than standing on one spot all her life.
So... from a screen writing perspective, this is exactly what we want. Because if the deer wants to eat the white flower, the red one would have a chance to poison the deer!
The second level of the story
Ok... is this enough? Well, not by far. We are just about to begin. Because every story needs a second level. To create this second level we think about the question: "How do the seeds of the white flower travel to the deer when it is finally dead in the end?" Well, there just could be wind, stroking over her face... getting the seeds from her to the deer? No. Thats random and arbitrary. We can use this to set up the second level wich makes the story really deep and complex and satisfying: The answer is: There is an insect carrying the seed from the white flower to the deer. Where does this insect come from? Lets answer that question by linking that problem to the story: We introduce the following: the deer ran over the red flowers family. She is the only one who survived. BUT she got hurt. Since then she is bleeding and the evil insects crawl around her, eat her poisonous blood (wich is obviously not so bad for the insects. They have only to be disgusting enough to make it believable that they are not hurt by the poison. wich brings us to production design later). So here we go with the second level of the story! The red flower is not poisonous anymore and also has a good reason for revenge! She first has to heal and regain the poison for beeing able to kill the deer. Well, how does she do that? The answer is easy: She uses the naive flower not only as a bait for the deer, but also as a bait for the insects!
She manages to make the white flower hurt herself. The smell of her young fresh blood will attract the insects. And this also explains how the "seed" (the blood) of the white flower travels to the deer in the end, because until then the insects would life on the white flower! You see how easy you find solutions if you know to what goal you are writing to?
The more "unbelivable" and strange the ending is, the more complex and satisfying will the whole story be in case you manage to connect all the dots wich at first seem to be apart from each other soooo far :) But in moviemaking there are not really far, in fact. Everything is possible. Thats what i like about telling stories in pictures.
So... for making the Insect a propper part of the story, we have to introduce the film with it, and end the film with it. That brings a certain gravity to the character. That is done in the directing part of the film wich includes the production design.
The script. Final thoughts.
In the end I put little hidden hints in the script and subtle sentences wich the audience could discover when they watch the film again. For example the red flower says about the deer: "the most beautiful things, often times, are the most dangerous." in the end the white flower says to the red one (as the red flower is now healed and regained the poison): "how beautiful you have become."
Friends of mine tell me that they discover something new everytime they watch the movie. I like that thought. It's not an easy to "understand" movie, but you can understand it emotionally right away.
What i call "reverse writing" is a very difficult approach because you have to structure the whole story on various spots on different levels at the same time from the ending to the beginning, but i consider it to be very effective for movies if you want a really punchy ending. I also wrote some feature length films that way wich is way more easy to do and to explain then in a short. All of the ideas and thoughts that i put into "descendants" ended up in a script that had only 6 pages! I had to write over 30 different drafts to make it work. It took me over 9 months thinking about this story (while modeling the characters at the same time.) until i considered every word to be in the right place. On the free market you don't have so much time to think about a story, so i wanted to do it at least for my diploma :) This experience in structuring a short, combined with my experience as a feature film writer brought me a huge benefit in my work as a script doctor. Also for me as a german it was cool to do an english spoken movie and explain all this difficult script stuff in a language that i am not native in. I am really happy that i went through this very difficult process and want to thank all of my professors wich had so much patience with me and made me able to develope my own problem solving secrets in matters of my approach of writing reverse.
The modeling
I used XSI 5.11 and just some basic tools. What i do is creating basic meshes with enough points and edges to sculpt out the stuff that i want. Then i use the single point tool, or the selection region tool to move the points around until they are in the right spot. This gives biological things a chaotic not too sterile look. Of course you have to look at basic proportions first, make drawings (wich were done by Christian von Bock.) But then you have to translate the drawings to 3D. And i am not talking about putting drawings in XSI and try to model around them. I litterally mean TRANSLATING. Because what works and looks sweet on paper, looks like total crap in 3D. Especially if you are creating something beautiful that should somehow appeal to everyone. Disgusting things are easy.
But beauty plus naivete plus innocence is really really hard! And of course you don't want it to be cliche either. The modeling of the white flowers face took me 5 months (with witing the story parallel to give myself some breaks and getting a fresh look at the modeling) until i considered it to be acceptable. The huge eyes that where cute on paper totally didn't work out in 3D. It always looked alienlike if i tried to take Chris drawings and put it 1:1 into 3D. It frustrated me until i had an idea. What if i try not to model the drawing that i see, but the INTENTION of the drawing? What may sound a bit abstract now worked fine for me! I tried to understand the "core sweetness" of the drawing and then re-designed the drawing on the fly while modeling. I always tried to have this "oh-god-thats-so-sweet" feeling in my heart that i had when i was looking on Chris drawings while working on the face in 3D. And it worked! Forget all the tools and all that crap in modeling. If you feel the character the magic happens.
For the design of the flowers, it came in handy that i did not know anything about rigging at all. If i did, i probably would have had mercy with my character rigger and TD Bernhard Haux and not give the flowers several dozen leaves that had to move when the flowers move! Because i did not know how much work i am causing to the others at that time, i just modeled what appealed to me. Still today, after i gained some basic knowledge about rigging and the problems, wich my complex models caused, i would not act diffetently because the models in their complexity worked out so well for the whole thing. For example we made some shots with the red flower in it: She starts to move her head and everywhere in the picture her leaves start to move too. That made the pictures really exiting and vivid.
If you have any question, about this or other productions, or if you want to involve me in YOUR project, don't hesitate to contact me.