Skydiving: Extreme Ironing

Me and the other Rachel have decided to work together for this module and the final project! Should be fun :D

Anyway, we had to pitch ideas to the tutors today and we were originally going to go with Rachel's idea of a medical student studying (late into the night) for a big exam who hears a noise downstairs. She investigates to find a monster in the kitchen. We had three potential endings; student actually knows monster and is annoyed with it, monster is making a cup of tea and med student looks between monster and tea - scene cuts to them both having tea, finally monster helps student study - as a resolution to that I thought it would be funny to have the student approach the monster with a piece of paper, she's angry, screws up the paper and throws it at the monster. Hopefully that would communicate that she failed the exam.

We found a monster rig we could use too. We tested it and it seemed really nice to use and simple enough.

Image from CreativeCrash.com

I touched on my ideas as they weren't as well developed or I'd completely written off as infeasible. The first idea (it is actually my fiance's idea, I just developed it a bit) was skydiving. Basically two or three guys with distinct personalities doing as it says on the tin; skydiving. Scene would start with them jumping off the plane, they do a couple of standard skydiving tricks and then it would descend into silliness. They'd do stupid stuff like extreme ironing, have a cup of tea and all sorts on the way down.
I initially imagined the personalities would be 1. very into the skydiving, cool guy with aviators 2. scared poopless and if there was a third 3. apathetic maybe? The last one was variable.
The ending is pretty variable too but if there were three personalities, the cool guy and scared guy would land fine (scared guy would be so glad to be on ground again) and Mr Apathy or whatever the third one was would smack on the ground. For some reason I can't think of this idea without getting Highway To The Dangerzone in my head... However this is the idea I'd written off as infeasible because I thought I would have to animate parachutes. I didn't mind this so much but I'd have to use shape animation to do it (the only way I could think of really) which would mean I needed to do it in Softimage as I have no idea if I can do this in Maya.

The other idea wasn't developed just because it was fairly recent and I didn't really have time with the deadline. It was just a kitchen scene with maybe a head chef and newbie. I was thinking of Laurel and Hardy slapstick at the time. That's about as far as I got at the time.

So which did the tutors and class think would be best? Funnily enough, the skydiving one. I'm okay with it, I knew the skydiving one would be fun but I expected it to be too complicated for now and was prepared to make it a future project. It's also a grand idea for a group project thinking about it because each member could animate a character.
To get around the parachute concerns, Chris simply said "don't". I'm totally fine with that.

As for what's happening from now on, we're going to just develop the idea at the moment and think of lots of silly things to do in mid-air for later decisions. Rachel still has some work to do on her 11 second club animation and I don't want to run ahead without talking to her about it first. I might get some sketch work done in the meantime so I can get some stuff out of my head.