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Having presented our animatic some of us started to realize that the story was lacking. So Aleksander and I tried out different ways to save our film, starting with one of our other, more complete stories, or fixing the one we had.
After a tense discussion later that day with the rest of the group, we decided to discard our original idea and start on a new and different story, using some of the designs we had lying around.
We sat down and came up with a lot of ideas for what was going to happen, and ended up with something we were confident to continue working on.

We kept the woman, robot and desert setting, but remade everything else.

Here’s the treatment which WE ALL worked on

Fetch!

DESERT day. LOW ANGLE CAM. Small FLOWER in focus. Ground shakes as from giant footsteps. PULL-FOCUS to reveal WOMAN and ROBOT-DOG walking down straight, endless road. Woman starts playing fetch with dog. Spots small animal. Woman’s stomach growling. Produces knife. Sneaks toward fluffy prey. Robot trails behind. Robot, desiring to help, overreacts by initializing destruction-mode, platforms large missiles, blows bunny to smithereens.

Montage begins. Rising action. Shot pace quickens:

Robot helps woman with CAGE-TRAP. Robot gets distracted, trap gets ruined.
Woman tries to throw SPEAR at bunny. Robot thinks they play fetch, catch spear split second before kill.
Woman tries to get water from small WATER CONTAINER/PUDDLE. Robot dives in, splashes water all over. No water left.
Woman tries to set up TENT, robot mess up somehow. Tent collapses.
Woman lights match to make fire, robot use FLAMETHROWER. Torches campsite.

Montage ends.

Woman, CAM LONG SHOT CENTER FRAME, sits about dispiritedly. Robot prances about in background. Full chaos. CAM MEDIUM SHOT. Silence. Hand enters frame. Gives flower to woman. They walk into sunset.

I’m confident that this new story is a better story than our previous one. At least there’s some gags that should be fun to animate. Our other story wasn’t about anything than atmosphere and fight scenes, with no real story. We actually managed to cram a plot into it, but it failed because it was just a mess of cool ideas we had.