About the Project
Gravamen is, at its core, an attempt at crafting something meaningful and funny. The current focus is on producing a ~30-minute animated pilot to release on YouTube. Should it receive traction, the goal is to continue producing and releasing episodes on a regular cadence.
Many of the characters descriptions have been left intentionally vague past only their most basic demographic details. Rather than unnecessarily pigeonhole talented voice actors into some arbitrary vision of the character, I would much rather hear what voices are out there and build a character around them.
This is, after all, a collaborative project if nothing else.
While the budget for the pilot includes funding for only several of the larger parts (and even those are below what I would like to be able to pay), the vision is that a successful pilot will lead to regular paid work for all voice actors in future episodes. Once all voice work and storyboarding is complete, we will open up the project here for talented animators to join the team.
Episode Summary
Otis and Bruce are completing a grueling shift as paramedics when the conversation veers to the fetish dominating Otis’ love life: historically accurate roleplaying as US presidents. An elderly patient in the back of the ambulance shares his own romantic presidential desires and dies. Not wanting to upset the man’s widow when asked to share his final words, Otis fabricates a poem. However, a video comes out revealing the true final words and Otis is fired. He takes all the blame to shield Bruce, whose daughter would likely not be able to receive the medical attention she needed were Bruce fired.
Rather than tell his wife he’s been fired, Otis continues dressing up for work each morning, spending his days drinking in an empty parking lot. Lacking a clear direction during this period, his focus shifts increasingly to the presidential role-playing arrangement with his wife until it is difficult for Otis to distinguish being in character from being himself. At the depths of this identity crisis, he is kidnapped by an unnamed department of the US government. Here Agent Libra reveals she has recruited him to help track down the clones of US presidents, which were originally created during the Cold War for unspecified reasons only to be released by Jimmy Carter on humanitarian grounds. Otis learns he will be replaced by a clone of actor and former president Ronald Reagan while on his missions, as the original Reagan was apparently notoriously accident prone and required mass-cloning in order to complete his terms in office, leaving the government with an abundance of Reagans. Skeptical that his wife would not notice the difference, Otis is shown video footage of Reagan and his wife enjoying a romantic dinner at home. This provides the necessary closure for him to accept his first mission: tracking down William Howard Taft.
In the ensuing weeks, Reagan is wildly successful as Otis both professionally and romantically. Meanwhile, fully in character as Taft, Otis struggles navigating the modern world. The episode ends with a disheveled Otis sitting on the real Taft’s tombstone at what seems to be another dead end. He smirks just as the scene cuts to credits.
Series Outlook
The pilot provides clear episodic structure via the one mission, one president conceit, while leaving enough questions unanswered (e.g. who is killing Otis’ predecessors and why, the original mission of the clone program, etc.) to allow for interesting deviations from this model.
Aesthetically, the project is built on several key elements: the dilation of time via montage as narrative device (The Ricklantis Mixup is a great example), building comic tension with unspoken visual irony (e.g. Vincent Adultman in Bojack Horseman), and ambitious transitions (e.g. Satoshi Kon). WIth a heavy employment of montages, so too will there be a heavy emphasis on music to establish mood and drive character progression (currently ~9 of the total ~31 minutes of running time are music-only montages). This also lends itself to a few interesting ideas for further episodes (e.g. one musical artist per episode, one genre per episode, etc.), but as of now the focus is on producing a successful pilot.
Timeline
