[Narrative] 01: In the kitchen + Every cloud has a silver lining; Initial Ideas

My Group Group 5 - Adam Stone, Danny Rollings, Sukhi Ghai

"Every cloud has a silver lining" Every bad situation has some good aspect to it. (phrases.org, 2014)

1. Steam (/Cloud) Baby

Cute clouds

Steam from kettle takes the form of a cute “baby-cloud” which excitedly zooms around the kitchen, squeezing through utensils like a floating racecar. There is a kitchen window, dramatically this window is opened by a shadowy figure and the cloud begins being sucked towards the outside – like into the vacuum of space.

The baby cloud fears for its life, thinking if it goes outside it’ll vanish into nothingness. Just as the cloud is about to be sucked out of the window, golden (or white/silver) rays of light shoot out from between the clouds in the sky as the “parent” clouds beckon the baby cloud up to them – picture alien abduction / jesus ascending to heaven in a beam of light.

So the cloud is a literal cloud, the silver lining is the gold light, the events also relate to the meaning of the phrase ‘in every cloud is a silver lining’

“Every bad situation (being sucked out the window – apparently to its doom) has some good aspect to it (meets its cloud family)”

2. Caveboy and the Discovery of Fire

A cartoon cave boy

The kitchen aspect comes later in the story, remember what Alan said about a laboratory doesn’t have to be an actual laboratory but can even be a planet that science experiments are done on for example.

It’s a stormy night in the Stone Age, before the discovery of fire. Thunder claps and lighting strikes off camera. 

The animation starts in a cave lit by fireflies, in which a young --simply modelled-- cave boy lays scared and crying in the furthest corner, rocking back and forth; this boy is all alone – an orphan. 

He clutches tightly in his arms a simple doll (voodoo doll-like) made of sticks and animal fur, held together by grass and stuffed with leaves. 

Along comes a beautiful big firefly, which draws him outside, a dead log is right in front of the cave entrance which is struck by lighting, setting it on fire. Cut to the boy’s wide eyes, in them you can see the reflection of the burning log.

10 years later 

you see him in his now ‘kitted out cave’, lit with fire torches, happily cooking meat on a spit above a log fire in a Stone Age style kitchen (think Flintstones) with maybe counters and a table made of animal bones in the centre, and possibly like stone pots and simple flint utensils on the side to emphasise the kitchen element.

The bad situation here is the storms and the boy's fear of them but the good aspect is it produced fire, and allowed him to discover fire resulting in him becoming more advanced.