I wrote this in kind of a "stream of thoughts" manner:
Six movies, each from first person point of view of each of the Animorphs, each will be the cameraman of their own movie – their point of view.
Their thoughts – subtitles? As in, the character’s speech don’t fit the words in the subtitles.
Is that too much exposition? Then voice-overs? Too artificial, cliché, done already? But how about if it’s continuous? Throughout the whole movie, almost nonstop, low volume? What would that do to the atmosphere – would you feel immersed in their situation and perception, or would it just be kind of creepy and annoying? Would it just be an easy cop-out for exposition? Implying things would be better than doing this, maybe.
Should it just start out with the first person and “My name is…” then move to third person/first person? Animorphs cannot be shot conventionally – you have to be in their minds, get to really, truly know them as well as you can know anybody. To that end, would there be some character development where there wasn’t before? Most of the ghost-written books – would those be the place for it? (This is for those people on the threads who say some characters didn’t grow.)
It is Most Important – we must know these children – we have to know them and empathize with them and identify with them in order for all the horrors to come to really hit home. They are people from our schools that we’ve known since kindergarten. They are not characters in some Pearl Harbor movie or something that heroicizes historical figures and gives a glimpse into their personal, dramatic, and flawed lives. This movie must, MUST BE their lives as much as it can, not so much a story being told, with the camera an organic and dynamic part of that world.
Possible example of this:
Scene: You see earth from the atmosphere. Intermittent reflections on the camera lens distract you for a moment. It’s a round, luminescent globe that fills the entire screen. All is silent. Almost oppressively so. Slowly, the camera moves closer – no horizon shots – just a steady movement towards the surface – the demarcation of night slowly creeps across our view – we see a coastline, an impossibly complex and intricate web of gossamer lights are visible – suddenly we break into the atmosphere, wind rushes by in a torrent, then wails by with a lonely tone. Closer – ridges and mountains looks like miles of crumpled bedspread. Closer – it looks like we’re falling – a forest – a town – a construction site – by its decrepit state we see its unfini – we see five children with their indistinct heads upturned and their eyes on the camera, following its every move. The wind has died down by now, but we hear what sounds like a guttering flame, except continuous and maneuvering. We zoom in to see their faces, their eyes, then down to Jake’s right eye’s reflection we see a fraction of a second of a glimpse of something hanging in the sky. Beat. Screen turns to black. (This last part and the following seems a little too cinematic for the “documentary feel” that I was going for, but I was trying to give a hint to the fact that this first movie is literally from Jake’s point of view.)
TITLE: ANIMORPHS
The screen fills with the sounds of an arcade videogame, 2-D pixellated characters moving across the screen with muted electronic sounds of dated game music, suffering, and chaos. The camera zooms out and we see that this is a reflection in the same eye that we focused on before the Title. Zoom out further to a look of intense concentration, then to include Marco playing beside him, shift the camera in a circular motion around them so that we see part of the game screen through their two silhouettes.
Please, anybody criticize or add scenes to this, or their own, specific, takes on how this movie would be made from shot to shot, camera angle, character interaction, etc.
Some random thoughts about this kind of stuff:
Morph thoughts and Andalite thoughts shouldn’t have voiceovers of heavy breathing in general, and specifically in battles, because it is in their heads – they aren’t using their lungs. This should affect voice-overs in some appreciable, if subtle way. For example, what would a “everyone held their breaths,” or “waited with bated breath” situations looks like?
Andalite voices should try not to be British – I know, it occurred to be too that since Andalites are very arrogant on the whole, and the accent just seems to fit, but still, it might take away from the reality of the story if Andalites just happened to have an Earth accent. I mean, if their was a cover story for it, like their translator programs chose it because of it fitting their thought patterns and syntax the best (this goes along with the no breathing in conversations thing)… of course this also brings up possibilities like the translator programs choosing a Jamaican accent or something (I choose this accent because it has a friendly connotation to it, kind of opposite to arrogance). That would be awesome. Visser Three would probably have something like a British accent because his subordinate human controllers would have knowledge of the human context of accents to know some accents fit and some don’t (imagine Visser Three yelling out orders in a Jamaican accent with all his underlings fighting not to giggle and get their heads cut off)
