I have never said i’m a good writer. I come up with daft ideas for short animations or short films, 99% of which don’t get made. Why? Because I can’t find an ending for them.
There is a small nugget of my brain which remembers a bit from a documentary about the Python team (could have been Parrot sketch not included but i could be wrong) which had a section about how they couldn’t finish the sketches so came up with stuff to end them like dropping 16 ton weights on people or, in the case of one of my fave sketches, having the audience mob the scene (the undertakers sketch with the immortal line “Look, tell you what, we’ll eat her, if you feel a bit guilty about it after, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it.”)
So I now have half a dozen ideas for mini clips to test parts of c4d and even a five minute video for a music track only i don’t want to just cut at the end or fade out… boooorrrriiing. I want to actually tell a story. The main ending i come up with everytime is the camera gets smashed in some way, either melted by acid spat from a gelatinous blob on a table, stood on by a 20 ft tall robot, smashed by a science experiment gone wrong or by a 5 ft tounge firing out of a mouth. I just can’t find a way to end these thing without the camera getting trashed and this is my variation of the 16 ton dropped from off screen but this may just be a weak excuse on my part to not actually get my finger out and make them.
Of course none of these compare to the one which ends with me dressed as Napoleon riding a toy horse down the middle of Christchurch park…
Spike Milligan had the same problem, which is why he used to do the “What are we gonna do now?” walk off at the end of some of his sketches.
Very true, i had forgotten the Goon show which he had written as well. So many ended with Wallace Greenslade just saying something like “It’s all in the mind you know”
Wasn’t it Scorcese after Raging Bull said he didn’t know where the next movie was coming from from. The interviewer told him ‘sure, must have loads of ideas’. Scorcese agreed he had thousands of great ideas – but not a single strand of a story to bring any of them together.
Or else it was someone else, talking aboùt something else in some other place entirely.
So now i can compare myself to the Pythons, Spike and Scorcese. I’m in an elite crowd there.