LOGLINE:

A struggling writer goes to the same coffee shop to work on her next novel and struggles to find the story she wishes to tell.

TREATMENT:

The bell jingles as the door to the coffee shop opens and a woman walks in with a tote bag. She orders her coffee at the front desk and takes a seat, putting an extensive set-up together. The woman places her laptop on the small table, plugs it in, places her phone, notebook and pencils right next to each other in a very regimented fashion. She cracks her fingers and pulls up a text document and begins typing. A few different colored winds blow from her screen around her, rustling her hair. Grass made of font letters begins to grow across the table, seeping down the base and spreading across the floor, gradually becoming more realistic. The scene of the coffee shop melts away to reveal an extensive magical forest. Small mushroom gnomes at the base of great oak trees cower as a group of fairies fly by. A cloaked figure with a staff emerges from the brush, and right when a weathered, tattooed hand goes to pull back its hood–

“Melissa!”

The bright fantasy world cracks away revealing the woman’s hands hovering still over the keyboard. The black bar at the end of her half-written sentence blinks at her. She looks up to see the barista placing her coffee on the desk. She huffs and strides over to her coffee, taking a long sip as she hurries back to her seat.

The woman stares at her screen, still sipping her coffee, and her eyebrows furrow. Little blades of grass crop up around her, slowly reforming the world that was once there, but less colorful and melting into the coffee scene. She types words and then deletes them, creatures appearing and disappearing as she does. This grows in intensity until she slams her laptop shut in frustration. The other coffee goers look at her apprehensively and she smiles nervously, shrinking into her chair and massaging her temple. She goes to her notepad, covered in indecipherable scribbles and crosses out “that one fantasy idea from that thing you saw once.” She taps the pen against the pad for a second and then reopens her laptop.

Like before, she adjusts her workspace, cracks her knuckles, and begins typing again. The coffee shop melts away into a black void, the only light coming from the woman’s laptop. Bright and colorful planets crumble together, stars burst to life, and swirls of galaxies mix together around her. She bats a satellite out of her face and starts looking around, the laptop melting away. She stands and starts moving around, adjusting the placement of planets. A small rocket blasts by and swirls around the space. The woman looks at it, thinks for a moment, and taps it a few times, cycling through different sizes, shapes, and designs until she finds one she likes and moves on. The rocket lands on a planet and the door opens slowly with a billowing cloud of steam and a figure emerges. As the smoke clears, a small cat floats out with a space helmet and meows, smiling cutely. The woman exclaims confusion and the cat’s face falls and the world begins to be sucked away into the blue highlighted text block and blinks away as she deletes it from the screen. She holds her face in her hands, fingers buried in her hair, mumbling about “why a cat” and “that literally makes no sense.” She huffs and starts writing again, the world slowly coming back around her and the cat morphs into an alien – then a robot – then an astronaut, and then another customer bumps into her. The whole world tilts to the side, the astronaut stumbling on the rocket ramp. The woman shakes her head quickly and gets back to creating a small robot sidekick when a subtle ringing begins. The woman exclaims out of frustration, looking around wildly until she sees her phone. It was ringing, a bright “mom” displayed on the screen. Scowling, she buries her phone in her bag and starts typing again.

The sun begins to set in the window, and the woman looks visibly very tired, annoyed, and disheveled. Multiple coffee cups surround her laptop. The world around her is desaturated into the coffee shop, much less prominent before, and is constantly shifting between worlds, characters amalgamating with each other as she frantically types words and deletes them and crossing things off on her notepad and moving her characters around her until suddenly–

“Hey, uh, you’ve been here for a while and you’ve had a lot of caffeine. I thought you might want this.” A small clear cup of water is placed on her notebook. Grimacing, she quickly picks it up off her work as the ink smudged slightly and looks up, seeing the barista smiling crookedly. He sees her glaring and holds up his hands in defense. “Um, it’s free! Cause it’s–uh. Y’know.” He gestured awkwardly. “Water.” He clears his throat, nods at her and goes back to his desk. She watches him go and looks at the cup of water, then back at him as he serves another customer. While watching him work, her hands start typing again, and the new world swirls around her but it’s just the coffee shop even brighter and more vibrant. She adds strange and interesting customers with dabbles of her other ideas: mushroom decor, a coffee shop cat, star-shaped lights, and the barista. The new world swirls around her and blinks away as she types out END, and saves her document.

BASIC STRUCTURE:

• Two main “worlds” – the real world where she sits at the coffee shop, orders food, ignores people’s calls, falls asleep on her keyboard, etc, and the idea world, represented by the creation of different ideas and worlds coming out of the laptop/filling up the screen
  • Style distinction between the real world (desaturated, a certain color palette, more realistic?) and the worlds of her ideas (mixed media)
  • Kinds of mixed media: watercolor + colored pencil + traditional 2D animation; a small amount of felt/tissue paper stopmotion mixed with digital 2D
• As she types on the screen of her laptop, the font swirls to create images and transition into the sequence of her idea
• She keeps getting into the flow of her ideas but is always interrupted or distracted or frustrated by the idea going nowhere – causes idea sequences to end via the screen turning to paper and crumpling or cutting to deleting a section of text
  • Animation gets sucked into it as it’s deleted?
• Her relationships with the people in her life (one or two other characters?) become more strained
• Realizes that she can write about the other coffee goers, and those around her (maybe a story about the same cup she uses, or a family member who keeps calling her, etc)

THEME/MESSAGE (tentative): She realizes that she has to live her life in order to create – the idea that you get inspiration from the world around you and the people in your life – taking the little things for granted in pursuit of something bigger, the answer was there all along, etc

INSPIRATIONS:

• Bojack Horseman – Diane book idea sequence
• Spongebob – essay writing procrastination sequence
• “Cannonball” – graphic novel
• “It’s lonely at the center of the universe” – graphic novel
• ‘Tortured genius’ trope but it’s just someone who needs to sleep and touch grass

WHY?:

I’ve gone through a lot of story ideas as I have so many, but I really wanted to tell a story that was personal to me and my journey as a storyteller. I wanted to focus on a centered relatable main character and character acting as well as elements of morph/experimental animation