The Cobra Effect - an open colab side project

There's a short and relatively simple film I'd be interested in making as a side project. It doesn't really fit into SP, and I don't want to do all the work myself, so I thought I'd put it up over here as an open colab project where anyone interested with the ability to contribute could do so.

So I was looking around for a while to find a story I could do about animals, or in this case reptiles, that could rely heavily on narration and animation. They are kind of rare, and I've always liked them when executed well.

I found this story published by of all people, the United Nations, and it was explaining multi variant causality via an old story about cobras in India.

The Story is pretty simple, and could be told in about 5 minutes I think. Here is the story -

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There is a city in India, or village, hundreds of years ago. The city has a problem with cobras. There are hundreds of cobras everywhere, like rats in NYC, and it's becoming a major problem, with people getting bitten by cobras every day.

So the city government comes up with a solution, which is to place a bounty on cobras, paying anyone who brought the head of a cobra to city hall.

Soon many enterprising cobra hunters are bringing in bags of cobra heads, and over time, the number of cobra attacks in the city is declining. The city thinks things are going well, and it's expected that as the cobra population drops, the number of bounties being brought in would decrease as well.

Strangely, the opposite happens. Each week more and more dead cobras are dropped off at city hall, and the bounty payments are on the verge of bankrupting the city. For a while, the city elders are puzzled. There are virtually no cobras left in the city, but somehow the number of bounties being brought in increases each week. So they investigate, in an effort to find out how this is happening.

They find out that people had figured out that there was easy money in the bounties, if you simply started breeding large numbers of cobras, and then simply chopping the heads off once they were grown.

Realizing that the bounty payouts were being abused, the city discontinued the program. With no financial incentive to continue breeding or housing the cobras, all of the people who had been doing so simply released the cobras into the streets, and at the end, the city had twice as many cobras as it did before the program started.

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I think this is a story that could be visually interesting, unique, provide a lot of interesting opportunities for music, sound, narration, and other types of design.

If anyone is interested in doing a one off side project to gain some XP, just comment. To work on the main sets and actors, one would need a 2080 card or similar, but there are a lot of other jobs that don't require anything special. Script development, foley, VO, music, etc.

In case anyone is wondering, yes, I do have a box full of artificially intelligent electronic cobras. It was 15 bucks.


For people that were following the AI paranoia thread, this is an actual practical use of AI, you can build a cobra brain and automate swarms of them with reasonable effort. I can make some pretty epic scenes by just building a small village and then setting 300 of these loose. The models can be made to look pretty good with a little work and some basic cinematography techniques.
 
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Interesting. Florida has wild pythons due to people releasing ones that got too large and also from hurricanes where they escaped their damaged habitats.
 
There's a short and relatively simple film I'd be interested in making as a side project. It doesn't really fit into SP, and I don't want to do all the work myself, so I thought I'd put it up over here as an open colab project where anyone interested with the ability to contribute could do so.
To clarify... this isn't a SP project, but you still plan it as an animation project? Or were you considering a mix of live action and animation?
 
To clarify... this isn't a SP project, but you still plan it as an animation project? Or were you considering a mix of live action and animation?
I'd do this in the new, semi realistic animation. Just using the current process to do a side project. Live action filmmaking with good quality is just too cost prohibitive. Even if I composite in the cgi snakes, I'd still have to build an 17th century Indian village in the US, so animation would be 1c on the dollar in this case. You get used to positioning the sun with a mouse, and then you don't want to go stand out in the cold all day waiting for magic hour anymore, lol. I'd love to do this one live action, but I can't see how I'd get the money back.

I can also sort of double bill this one as gaining XP for my work at SP. We've made huge improvements over the last 9 months, but we still need a few major rehearsals before we're ready to go live. This is an interesting project on my end because it involves automating the behavior of crowds and groups of animals. It's a skill that could be put to good use in many other types of scenes.
 
Is this like one of those Alan Smithee deals and you are afraid to put your SP name on it?
 
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