Rise Of The Frankenstuffies

Is the book better than the movie? Well, I made both!¹ Why would I do that? PLP! All of this was made for the project Rise Of The Frankenstuffies, where we disassembled stuffed animals, made new ones out of the parts, and created a short film about them. There was a lot more to this project,² so let’s start at the beginning.

As I mentioned, we would be making a story about a “Frankenstuffie,” but, as the Frankenstuffie would be actual stuffies, we first had to take normal stuffed animals, rip them apart, and transform them into our Frankenstuffies. To create mine, I took the foot of a massive pink elephant, the head of a hedgehog, and some miscellaneous body parts. I filmed this process and made this short video:

Alongside the video, we created a set of documents outlining the physical details of our character, along with personality, ideals, and traits. This would prove useful when we were writing our stories, as we would have a reference for how our characters would behave in a variety of situations³.

Now that we had a character, we could decide what story we wanted to tell. While I was writing up my character information, I started to think about where the character came from, which led me to a story about the lab that created my character kidnapping my character’s owner/friend, and the character going on a quest to rescue him.

To create a well-rounded story, we used The hero’s journey, which is a format found in a staggering number of stories, from modern stories such as Lord of the Rings to Ancient Greek myths.

Here’s an image that represents a common version of The hero’s journey:

Building off my basic story idea, I made a few modifications to create my hero’s journey. For one, to fit with the more light and comedic themes of some of my inspiration, I changed the story to be less of a kidnapping, and more of a misunderstanding revolving around thinking IRS meant CIA. Next, I added some allies to Snubbin,⁴ first a friendly dog who pulls Snubbin from a river, then a retired tour guide rat who helps guide the pair through the sewers of the city. I then added some obstacles they had to overcome, and I was done.

Now that we had a clear idea of what our story would be, we set off developing a theme statement for our story, which is a sort of overview of the key ideas of your story. Looking over my story, I decided on friendship and courage as my main themes and wrote out this theme statement:

Companionship and courage can be found in pursuit of those we love.

With a hero’s journey outline and a theme statement, we could start writing our short stories. Well actually, there was one more problem that needed to be solved:

The hero’s journey was too long.

While one could easily write an entire story based on the hero’s journey, it would probably be very long and pretty time-consuming to write. To avoid this⁵, we took a slice of our hero’s journey⁶ and turned it into a story frame, which is a short overview of what will happen in the short story.

With my story frame and theme statement to help guide it, the writing process only took 5 or so days consisting of writing, moving stuff around, rewriting, and staring blankly at my pages document. After those 5 days, I submitted my “final” version, but noticed some small issues with phrasing and the like, so I fixed those to make my actual final draft.

• A little tangent

  Before we had even made our Frankenstuffies, we had been reading Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld. As always with PLP, this was for a multitude of reasons. First, it was to investigate writing for fiction, as well as the themes in fiction. Second, one of the themes in the book was transformation, which is something that we also looked at, in relation to the transformation of our Frankenstuffies. Finally, in the book, which is set in a fantasy version of WW1 fought between the Darwinists and Clankers, the Darwinists (similar to the allies) use fabricated creatures, formed via genetic engineering; these creatures were very similar to our Frankenstuffies.

Now we had a story, the “final” step was to create a film out of it. We had already done this for Thrill Us! so we started there, creating a storyboard for our films. In Thrill Us, I had made a storyboard with very detailed frames and not a lot of dynamic shots. This time, I decided to do the opposite of that. I started with a storyboard “sketch,” so I could plan out the basic shot composition and camera movement, I then refined it, and partially animated it, to get a gauge of shot lengths.

When storyboarding, I decided to use two different styles of animation for my film, rough, fluid 2D animation to represent the flashback/recap and 3D animation for the rest of the film.⁷ I started by getting some of my friends to record voicelines, then I created the sound for the animation. I then imported the sound and animated over that, so I could sync everything properly.

Animating in blender:

The animation process went fairly well, but I wouldn’t consider the final product a fully completed film. If I had more time, I would use this as a draft to build up a polished product, I would also try and refine the art direction a bit more. One thought I had was making the 3D animation a low-poly style.

Overall, I’m pretty content with what I could create in the time I had. I had never attempted a long 3D animated short film, so this provided an opportunity to explore this medium more.

Now that you have seen my video and read my blog post, answer some questions about how you thought my story communicated its themes here:

Thanks for reading, until next time.