Cygnus and Spink

Rough moodboards:

Gargoyle characters for my Senior film. Animated storyboards can be found here:

Storyboards for Stoned from Priya Koppikar on Vimeo.

Synopsis/Pitch for Stoned:

Cygnus and Spink, the only two stone gargoyles perched on a long-forgotten cathedral, look over a futuristic, industrialized and polluted city that is obsessed with technology.

When at dawn, they return to their pedestals to turn into stone, Spink makes a mistake, causing his pedestal to slowly give away--taking him with it. Cygnus, being the bigger and the only winged-creature of the two, has already turned into stone. Yet it is up to Cygnus to save the only companion he has in a world that no longer looks to them for protection and guardianship .

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Storybeats can be found here (PDF).

This is a production blog for my senior film, Stoned, currently in production. Conceptualized in Spring 2009 and visualized in Senior 1 of Fall 2010.

Why gargoyles? I wanted to do something that could not have been done in live-action, and take full advantage of the surreality of animation and the 3D space that we work so much with.

I wanted this film's story to have a certain relationship between guardianship and sacrifice, and I wanted the characters to be something very trivial and overlooked, almost overlooked and now forgotten (especially in today’s modern world). Gargoyles embody the past but they have a purpose that is still part of the present, which relate to protection and security--which is essentially what this film is about. That, and the myth about turning into stone in daylight.