FP - Storyline
Sunday, April 10, 2011
As mentioned in the earlier post, our story is set in the year 2208.
Coincidentally, exactly 197 years after the submission of our final project (4th April 2011, Monday), 4th of April 2208 falls on a Monday too, and this is when our story takes place.
The protagonist is an unnamed school boy aged 14.
The rough storyboard sketches for our project are as follows:
- A group of students go on a school field trip to GM food factory (FutureFoods Corp.).- They tour the part of the factory that deals with the final processing of the meat produced there (they see neat, clean pieces of meat being packaged on conveyor belts).- One of them (the protagonist) gets too engrossed in looking at all the machinery and makes a wrong turn at a junction, getting separated from the group.
- While trying to find the rest of the group, he wanders into another section of the factory (not noticing the restricted sign at the door).
- He sees a big laboratory in which there are glass capsules filled with mutated, suffering animals.
- There are lots of tubes plugged in to the animals’ bodies, pumping drugs into them.
- He goes into another room and finds human test subjects who have horrible side effects from eating mutated meat.
- Just then, a scientist appears and spots the main character. He freaks out and runs away.
- In his panic, the main character falls into a machine and gets trapped
- Unable to get him out, the factory is forced to alert the authorities to help in the rescue.
Original planned ending sequence:
-The authorities (police, ambulance etc.) arrive and get the main character out of the machine.
Final chosen ending sequence:
- After the authorities are shown to have arrived, we cut immediately to a scene of the main character slowly opening his eyes in the hospital.
Original ending sequence:
- While being placed into the ambulance, the main character sees the mutated animals and human test subjects being taken away by police, who have found out about FutureFood Corp.'s inethical conduct.
- At the hospital, he reads a newspaper article about the scandal being revealed to the public.
Final chosen sequence:
- At the hospital, the main character reads the newspaper and sees an article exposing the ugly truths behind the factory.
- He has a flashback about the scene when he was rescued as well as the products and test subjects being brought away by the police.
- Either way, the story ends with a head-on view of the meal provided by the hospital. Attached to it is a reminder to our protagonist and our readers, to set them thinking about the implications of GM food.
- The cover page of the comic was designed last. Since our story revolved around the theme of GM food (GM chicken in our story), we would like our protagonist to come face to face with a GM chicken in a tank of unknown fluids (chemicals, etc), with several tubes attached to it.
- We added a short synopsis on the back cover of our comic, though it was not really required for an e-book. (but this is done to mimic an actual hardcopy comic book.
The ending sequence shown in the rough storyboard here is the original planned storyline, which is very linear and shows all events in chronological order. However, this can be monotonous. Thus, we changed to the final ending sequence, which can be seen in our final prototype here. This is to give the story flow more variation and suspense by reordering the events in the form of a flashback, thus resulting in a more satisfying ending for our comic.
posted at
16:40
- A group of students go on a school field trip to GM food factory (FutureFoods Corp.).
- While trying to find the rest of the group, he wanders into another section of the factory (not noticing the restricted sign at the door).
- He sees a big laboratory in which there are glass capsules filled with mutated, suffering animals.
- He goes into another room and finds human test subjects who have horrible side effects from eating mutated meat.
- In his panic, the main character falls into a machine and gets trapped
- Unable to get him out, the factory is forced to alert the authorities to help in the rescue.
Original ending sequence:
- Either way, the story ends with a head-on view of the meal provided by the hospital. Attached to it is a reminder to our protagonist and our readers, to set them thinking about the implications of GM food.