I've chosen the Office Olympics sketch, for a number of reasons:
a) I've worked in offices
b) I've never been in a job where an environment specific game wasn't invented - for example, I once worked in a warehouse with a 9-hole golf course (plank of wood for a club and a roll of parcel tape as a ball)
c) I'm intrigued by the potential to subvert the relationship between what's seen and heard
d) the tragic pathos of the necessity to imagine such elaborate scenarios - in order to survive a day in work - to me, is fundamentally English humour. Bittersweet I think you'd call it - the best example I can remember was from my time a postman, where another, older postie was actually writing a pantomime, populated by characters from the delivery office - bosses as baddies, etc. He would occasionally produce a crumpled hand-written manuscript and earnestly recite scenes - which I found both endearingly inspirational and tragically pathetic, in equal measure. Essentially, it's that I consider imagination to be both the curse and the redemption of the office worker.
Therefore, this is the tone I have chosen to adopt.
A particular contextual influence is the British artist David Shrigley, whose work I have always appreciated. And someone who's work absolutely represents all the tragedy any pathos of modern living - in a funny, abstract, ridiculous way. Also, having looked again at the animation work from his illustrations, I think this minimal style (both in terms of complexity of image and movement) suits the dry, slightly geeky intellectual humour of the sketch. Below is my favourite: The Door.
CHARACTER DESIGN
I want a simple visual style, with a grayscale colour pallete but with characters bolder than the background - as presented here, characters black with white detail.
After much deliberation I have decided that instead of producing a limited storyboard/moodboard & treatment, I'll get my office man to do an audition pitch to the BBC...
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