Before that though we had a chance to meet Niki Groves, who has worked as a Producer and Production Co-ordinator for Alison DeVere and Spider Eye studios. She is going to be supervising our productions until the end of the semester. Surprisingly, but more importantly, she completely understood our animatic. Before we showed her, she had never seen any of our work for Candy Island, so to have a fresh pair of eyes viewing our animatic and understanding the story and what is happening is really really great!
After that, later on, we then showed Derek who has been following our animatic and already understood the story. He recommended we make a few a changes to our film, the most noticeable being the ending; he felt it wasn't satisfying enough and overall a bit flat. I must admit I did like our ending (which was that our pilots are cooked and eaten, and we are then shown that this has happened to many more pilots who have succumbed to the marshmallows). I thought it was quite a clever ending, but it is a little cliche and made our main characters, Ande and Mozbie, pretty much obsolete. We agreed with Derek's advice and went out thinking of a new ending, possibly with some sort of twist but still keeping the vulgarness and weirdness of the rest of the film. It wasn't too long until we came up with one, and this is it:
Ande and Mozbie are rolled into the hot chocolate tub to be cooked and eaten. The camp marshmallow (whom they met on the beach) walks past them. Ande notices him and tries to get his attention, hoping that he could save them. The marshmallow ignores his pleas and carries on walking until he is off screen. Ande, now realising his death is inevitable, looks distraught. Mozbie, meanwhile, has no idea what's going on and even seems to be enjoying himself. The camp marshmallow walks up the ramp and back on screen until he's right next to Ande, who is now frantic. The marshmallow begins to comfort him, stroking his face and nodding his head (as if to say "it's okay, I understand" sarcastically), and then presses his finger to Ande's lips to make him quiet. The marshmallow is then handed a cake off screen, and holds it up to Ande. Mozbie sees this and tries to get to the cake, pressing himself against Ande to reach it; even using his tongue to try to get it. The marshmallow then looks at the screen, and gives a cheeky wink 'troll face'. The screen then fades to black, and we just a hear the sound of a microwave 'ding'.
It's quite a different ending to our original one definitely. We see more of the cooking scene, thus more time to connect with our two characters before they are eventually killed. It also sort of has a sick, torture-esque feel to it, but in a comical way (it reminds me of that scene in Wedding Crashers where Vince Vaughn is tied to the bed and his girlfriend's strange Brother is on top of him, where Vaughn is helpless to what the Brother does to him; just like how Ande is with the marshmallow). This ending also helps to link back to the beginning, so the marshmallow who finds them and greets them into the village is also the one who ends up killing them.
We've also now removed two shots, which we realised weren't necessary and their removal makes the film flow better. Other than that, there were only a few small little changes; such as how we need to make Ande and Mozbie turn and face the forest rather than just each other so we know they're about to walk to it. The very first shot of them flying past the screen in the plane has to be higher up so the background will then be the sky. This is because we slow down the plane when they're close up to see the characters, so the sense of speed slowing down will look more effective when the background is just sky rather than the island. The scene were Mozbie unknowingly has the chance to escape has been re-worked with better camera angles and to show more character with Ande and Mozbie. We also need to swap two shots around when it's revealed the marshmallows are evil, and Ande needs to be closer to the house he eats when he walks away.
It's quite a hefty update to our animatic as there are some big changes which change the story quite a bit! But it's exciting to see our film improve each time we show off our animatic, and getting the feedback from our lecturers and now Niki as well. We are back to having weekly sessions where we will show our animatics, which will be really helpful in trying to finally finish the animatic. Meanwhile I am still finishing Backgrounds and improving on any which need work.
