Sunday and Monday Meetings

Hi everyone,

Here's a re-cap of what we went over in Sunday and Monday's meetings.

Sunday we met to decide on a clearer story direction from the options we had from Friday's meeting. Unfortunately, after about two hours of deliberation, we hadn't come much closer to choosing a single direction. Instead, we selected three potential directions from the material developed since the previous meeting. We decided to pitch the basic premise well as the three possible ideas in Natalie's class on Monday to see what she and the other group thought of the ideas, then decide whether or not to hold a meeting later that day.

In Natalie's class we presented our ideas and received some useful feedback as well as some more criteria on which to mold our story directions. We decided to hold a group meeting after classes so we could decide where to go.

At the meeting, we had a few members absent, but they had informed us that they would not be present and that we should continue with the meeting. We discussed the options available, then held an anonymous vote to decide our final story direction. The tally was 8 for the zombie direction, 0 for the slapstick idea, and 1 who didn't care. We then came up with our basic storybeats, fleshed out the core concepts for our main characters, and decided on a setting. The characters, the setting, and the storybeats are as follows:

Greedy, jerk leader guy, short and fat.
Smart, innocent scholar, translator, unexpected hero/ine, guide-ish.
Heavily-armed goon, bodyguard, not very bright but has common sense, treated poorly by the leader.

Set around WW2 at a tropical jungle temple.
Daytime until theft of treasure, after which it magically becomes night.

Storybeats
The three characters are going to explore a temple.
They reach the temple, and discover that a tribe still inhabits it.
The characters make their way through the tribe and reach the treasure.
The Leader sees the treasure and intends to take it.
The Scholar, then the Guard, tell him not to take treasure b/c of a warning inscription.
The Leader takes it anyway.
All the tribals become bloodthirsty zombies.
Scholar and Guard try to rectify the situation
The Leader gets eaten by zombies
Seeing the fate of the Leader, the Scholar and Guard band together to escape with their lives.

For Wednesday's meeting with Mark, he has asked for four panels representing our take on the story. The above synopsis is still missing some critical details, so if everyone does their panels filling in whatever details they feel are missing, we can use those to finish fleshing out our story. Also, we can use the images, along with any other design exploration, to begin to develop a visual direction.

Now that we have a firm direction, I think that we should start working out how to divide up the work necessary for the next stages of production in our meetings later this week. Since most of us are pretty new to the process, I think we should discuss with Tony the best way of going about that.

-Adric Worley