How To Write A Story... Or Lack-Of-A-Story

It's been a rough couple of weeks and finally I'm back on track. I have been struggling to focus on my work for a while now, which is very unlike my work habits. Now with a deadline I set for myself (to complete a storyboard by Wednesday) fast approaching, I have sorted out all my thoughts and settled on a brand new story for my project. Well...not entirely new, but still significantly different from my original idea.

After the review this past week, I got rid of most of the story elements of my animation and am left with the bare minimum.

The story goes like this: The tortoise, hare and dog are going to race, and the sheep is going to try and stop them simply because there are no sheep allowed in the race. That's it. It's all that is needed to make the animation work. Each character is motivated to win the race not for a camera, but simply for the title of first place and nothing more. The sheep is motivated to make the racers fail simply because if he can't race, then no one can.

For the sake of getting my thoughts written down, I'm going to explain how I went about writing the new story.

I have still yet to actually storyboard out the scenes; it actually helps me to write or type everything down like I am doing right now. So I have a few different notepad documents on my desktop sorting out the story. The first goes down the list of characters. I was given the suggestion to make the animation very gag based, and have those gags revolve around what kind of animals the characters are.

For the tortoise I listed gags that included him being taken out of his shell, him sliding around on his shell instead of racing on foot, or him being stepped on by the other racers.
For the hare I came up with gags involving the use of his ears to traverse the terrain in the race.
In keeping with the dogs absolutely silly looking design, I have him being easily distracted by things like a mirror unveiled by the sheep, in which he sees another dog. I think the dog is acting the most animal-like out of all of my characters.

Something that I thought was clever for the sheep is how fast he runs from one trap to the next to set them off. It's subtle, but if you realize how fast he is going, then you'll know that if the sheep was in the race, he would win absolutely no problem.

After coming up with the jokes, I came up with the sequence that they would appear in by making a flow chart of the race (a technique which came highly recommended) in which I go step by step and map out where each character is at any given timer and what place they are in when they reach each of the sheep's obstacles.

After this, I decided what kind of environment each of the obstacles is located in.

Finally I wrote the script; a very messy way of describing what's going on in words probably only I could understand. For example, here's a quote from these notes of mine:
"He is able to stick his arms and head back out rather quick but the tortoise and dog both step on him to get past, and he gives a hurt, dizzy look at the audience.
Cut to a faraway view of the field, that pans over to a bridge over a river, and by the time it stops panning, we see the sheep in the foreground with a plunger that sets off bridge explosives."
Brilliant writing, isn't it? I know.

I have a fairly long script here which tomorrow I can easily transform into a storyboard.
It may be time for me to photocopy A LOT of storyboard sheets...

Once the storyboard is completed and reviewed, I will start immediately on the animatic. I want to get the planning done and over with so I can animate ASAP. I know it's going to take a while to do all of this and I don't want to end up finding out I have less time than I thought.