Treatment

Title:

Bold Donkey

Duration:

30 – 60 seconds (per episode)

Main Characters:

Bold donkey
The Sheep
Mrs Background (old lady)

Synopsis:

Bold Donkey is a loveable donkey with a mean and rebellious attitude. In each episode Bold Donkey and his background sidekicks get into short yet mischievous adventures without even having to move from the field.
Basically Bold Donkey stands in his field, something happens around or to him, he reacts and then at the end of the episode he winks to show he “knows the crack”.

Soundtrack:

Original Bold Donkey soundtrack.

SFX:

Occasional noise from Bold Donkey and or other characters. (No Dialogue)

Statement of Intensions

My main aim for this project is to express my sense of humour through the medium of animation. The animation was created using Macromedia Flash editor and is purposely meant to look poor and amateur. I feel that over the past ten years animation has become too polished and modern. With Bold Donkey I am not completely abandoning modernism as the humour is supposed to be post modern and dim-witted, but more adapting a rougher style in the drawings and animation that is purposely unfinished and almost lazy, which is what makes it unique. I consider the bad animation part of Bold Donkeys humour. Even though Bold Donkey appears to have a rougher style of animation and seems easily done it is quite time consuming to successful create this affect.

The storyline and narrative of Bold Donkey is intentionally minimalist and simplistic because I wish for the viewer to concentrate on the characters more. The trademark of Bold Donkey is his wink at the end of each episode. I feel making the story in each episode simple, the audience will connect with Bold Donkey and will make them more aware of the donkey’s reactions. Such as his trademark wink.

Bold Donkey follows a simple narrative formula throughout the series:

Exposition - Donkey and sheep in a field and all seems normal.

Development – Nothing happens and the audience is in suspense. This suggests to the audience that its just a normal donkey and sheep.

Complication – Something “bold” happens and causes the donkey to react.

Climax – There is a build up in the situation and the audience is unsure what is going to happen.

Resolution – Bold Donkey winks and the episode is over.

A lot of Bold Donkeys surrealist images and humour was inspired a lot from other artists such as The Mighty Boosh, Channel 4’s Modern Toss and even music from Frank Zappa and the Mothers.

Modern Toss’s of the wall post-modern style of animation influenced Bold Donkey greatly. Its stylistic sketch like animation mixed with live action inspired me to want to do something like this. The humour is not unlike my own either and works well with the animation. The main element that I plan to adapt from Modern Toss is the rough and gritty style of animation that almost distorts the characters.

The mighty boosh stimulated my imagination thoroughly for this project. Its wacky idea’s and bizarre imagery relates to me immensely in every aspect. Episodes like Charlie about a piece of chewing gum that gets melted and remade into a hoover by a crocodile from Alaska or the priest and the beast episode where it is set in a desert in the 1970’s with two phycadelic monks are trying to find the new sound, inspired me to do this project. The main elements that I plan to take from the mighty boosh is the surrealist humour the connection with the characters and the use of sound in the animation shorts.

I want to use these techniques to my advantage of drawing my audience in to the world of Bold Donkey. I want it to look in this particular way because it is unique and a different sense of humour to that of the mainstream and I feel that by using this simple formula in Bold Donkey the audience will be intrigued and will hopefully enjoy it.