Elevator Pitch: 

This is a story of exploration where a creature emerges onto a new land and has to traverse and adapt to its environment, changing and moving on until it finds creatures similar to itself and can be at home.

Character Relationships:

The main character is a creature that is trying to explore the new world it has found itself in, trying to learn and adjust to it by exploring and seeing the creatures around it.

• Main character creature – unique gait, curious, explores landscape / Environment
• Secondary character creatures – Main creature meets along the way, they have adapted somehow to the environment; help spark curiosity / desire to adapt in Main character.
• Family creatures – Meet main creature at end of the story, similar to main character after adapting,
• The Environment – driving agent of change in story

The Main Creature is both curious about this new landscape and environment but also looking for its own “herd” so it can essentially make its way to a familiar home.  As it sees the other creatures and how they move differently from it, it reacts to that and tries to mimic their motions and fit better in the environment. These adaptations can be shown as different behavioral patterns (change in gait, breathing pattern, walk cycle / speed, etc.) as well as with changes in a body part’s state (length of part, changing of orientation or color, change in “skin”, etc.)

Story Beat Outline:

1. The Main Creature emerges onscreen into a new environment (either from the sea onto land or from one climate to another)
2. It observes its new world and tries to traverse the landscape using an inefficient set of motions.
3. It sees / comes into contact with a first set of new Secondary Creatures that are moving much faster than the Main Creature.
4. The Main Creature tries to adjust its gait and walk cycle to catch up.
5. It becomes faster but not enough to catch up to the new Creatures, which speed offstage.
6. The Main Creature, slightly disheartened, continues on at its new (marginally)  faster pace until it is distracted by something.
7. It comes across creatures that move similarly to it, but look a little different. They are unsure what to make of the Main Creature.
8. The Main Creature tries to edit its posture / features to look more like these creatures.
9. The creatures now notice the Main Creature and recognize it as one of their own, revealing themselves as its Family Creatures.
10. The Main Creature rejoices and moves along with its new family into their new home.

Notes on Realization

The movements should be slightly sudden, and more machine-like than natural, especially for the Main Creature at first. Once it adapts its movements, then it can be smoother and more natural.

The Main Creature’s design will probably be the most complex of the characters due to its modifiable-state nature. The other creatures should be kept simple so that they can be powered easily and we can have at the very least a pair each of the Family Creatures and the Secondary Creatures so that they can act and travel as groups.

The creatures should all “communicate” using actuation sounds, thuds, and beeps so that the performance keeps its robotic nature about it. Little music if any should be involved, it should be more about sound effects and framing the performance to look like the robots are interacting.

The stage itself might have certain obstacles or features that help explain the need for the creatures to adapt. The specifics can be determined as we decide on a form / concept for the robots.

Evaluation:

• Can robots convey the idea of permanent change / adaptation / evolution with subtle movement changes?
• Can we use solely robot actuation sounds to convey meaning and/or a dialogue between different robots?
  • Will the audience be able to differentiate that from robots simply running simultaneously?