3rd year Major Project: Initial Ideas/ Characters

At the end of the second year I presented a below average idea to a panel. I understood that the storyline was a bit depressing.I felt that the symbol of death following human beings caught up in the drug culture was a bit cleshai and the panel believed that the script was weak and needed to be changed. Instead of tweaking this idea I completely changed my story and characters and decided to take a more comedy approach to my third year major project.
My interest in music festival and the festival lifestyle drove me to create an animation based on two characters experience at the beginning of a festival. I originally wanted to focus on the two characters struggling to build their tent, this way I could get humour out of the accidents that occur and misfortune of the characters. The animation is going to be around 90seconds long aimed at being shown as a short to promote the broadcasting of a music festival on a certain television channel. From previous work I feel it would benefit me most by creating the animation in 3D. Certainly the characters would be modelled, rigged and animated in the Maya software but considering the scale of the project I have began to consider using 2dimensional backgrounds and using depth of field and effects in a comping package to create the illusion of a 3D background. Props and foreground elements will be created in Maya but to avoid waisting time i will seek the help of modellers from the second year to create different tents.
When designing the characters I wanted to get across that one of them was a regular festival goer while the other one was having his first festival experience. The relationship between the two character is comparable to that of laurel and hardy. With one who believes he is superior but annoys the other character who could be considered the more sensible of the two however is hindered by his friend. I need to consider the characteristics of the characters so that the 'comedy duo' effect is successfully achieved otherwise the characterisation will fall apart and the relationship between the two characters wont be clear resulting in the story failing to provide any comedy at all. After watching some Pixar shorts I realised that the audience needs to feel some sort of empathy with the characters so that they can relate and be taking on a emotional roller coaster throughout the animation, drawing the audience into the piece.