Comedy Series Proposal
Monster Space Bungalow
The story of a bunch of monsters, stranded in a bungalow, floating through space, burning time until they can find a place to call home.
Monster Space Bungalow is a comedy about creativity, imagination, adventure, and maybe the most magical thing of all; soul crushing boredom. It's a television series with a heavy digital/interactive component that blends old-school Jim Henson-inspired practical puppet effects with cutting edge digital animation and modern illustrative techniques.
Monster Space Bungalow is a show about being a kid and waiting for your life to start.
Except with monsters.
Except for adults.
Picture a house. Something familiar; a bungalow with chipped kitchen counters and laminate in the bathroom. Now imagine that house plucked from the earth, dirt still clinging to the crawlspace, and tossed into the cosmos. The vastness of space punctuated by a small, inviting house with nothing for thousands of miles but the mailbox and an old bicycle caught in its orbit.
If you were to peek through the front door, you’d be greeted by a very confused, but polite cast of the strangest, sweetest, most extraordinary creatures you’ve ever seen. How did these monsters find their way into this house? How did it find its way into space? What exactly happens when they flush the toilet? These are the questions at the heart of Monster Space Bungalow.
Series Focus / Themes
Monster Space Bungalow is a traditional 13 x 20 minute episode televised season with an A and B plot focused on parallel, often overlapping narratives taking place in and around the ramshackle house floating through space. It's an examination of imagination and creativity as a means of self discovery; the idea that it’s when we’re bored that we discover who we are. It’s a show that acknowledges the sense of an unseen, much larger “grown-up world” that’s just beyond your reach throughout childhood, and uses it as a launching point for extraordinary adventures of imagination in an already imaginative world.
Monster Space Bungalow takes the feeling of a lazy, rainy Sunday trapped at home and knits it into the sprawl and scope of a space opera. We follow Ollie, a kind-hearted Abominable-Snowman-esque monster with musical aspirations, social anxiety issues, and an imaginative sense of humour, and Art, a dry, but ultimately affectionate, little red alien (equal parts firefly and muppet), as they navigate what might be the strangest housing situation in the universe. It’s a show about making music, creating art, and learning about who you are in the process.
Outline of Relevance
In terms of production, Monster Space Bungalow is uniquely positioned to take a medium associated with younger audiences (the puppet show) and expand it beyond not just your core children’s audience, but to a wider adult audience online. By merging live action puppetry with cutting edge animation and illustrative techniques (generally, but not always compartmentalized in segments) we can create something that evokes nostalgia while still feeling cutting edge. We want to tap into the crossover success of shows like Adventure Time and My Little Pony, producing a show with two equally fervent fan bases — the kids it’s supposedly created for, and the adults enticed by the prospect of a modern take on the classic “puppet show.”
Monster space Bungalow is never vulgar. It's just really weird.
it's a show for adults, that a kid would be over the moon to have discovered.
For kids, the show places a great deal of focus on making sure the dialogue, and tone of friendship is an honest reflection of their experiences. We use naturalistic dialogue, stammering and awkwardness in an effort to make sure the relationships between the monsters rings true. Thematically; there’s the idea of adventure. Adventures are a precious commodity when you’re a kid. They rarely fall in your lap, and most of the time you have to make them up for yourself. Despite the fantastical setup of the show, most episodes begin with the Monsters making their own fun. While things typically go south from there — unravelling wildly and beyond the Monster's control, this core idea, of giving agency back to children, is a crucial part of the show.
Monster Space Bungalow places a large focus on making sure that the production, specifically the music and cinematography, featured in the show never feels as though it’s pandering or attempting to fit some vague idea of “kids content.” Everything in Monster Space Bungalow is made to feel modern and to-the-moment. The music the monster’s are singing will remind you of what you’re hearing on the radio.
Production Treatment
Monster Space Bungalow takes place in a single physical set; the titular bungalow. We use practical effects and puppetry to bring the Monsters to life, and film using a animation/radio-play structure. We write and record scripts as radio-plays, refine the plot during this phase, then film to those audio files using puppeteers acting along to the audio file. It’s shot single camera.
But crucial to the tone; it doesn’t, nor should it, always be that way. A song can take the Monsters on an adventure of the imagination made out of paper cutouts, or CGI, or a motion-graphic montage. As you’ll see in the digital short below, imagination can mean the monsters can plunge into a painting, and suddenly find themselves animated (and they won’t keep quiet about it). And if an episode wants to flip this structure, and cold open as a Hannah Barbera inspired animated show — as long as we all know who’s who, all good. By bringing in freelance visual creatives with their own style, we can make a show that’s dynamic and constantly evolving. And since the core footage is built around a relatively cheap puppet/physical production model, with these limited, hyper-stylized segments, we can create a show that feels alive and cutting edge, while keeping cost relatively low.
Because we live in the future and making and sharing have become all knotted up in each other — everything the monsters make will be online. Ollie composes a song? You can listen to it on Soundcloud. Space Whale (we’ll get to him) takes a sweet photo? Follow him on Instagram. The whole gang hunkers down and makes a totally addictive video game? Get your cool self over to the app store and download that thing ASAP. They have no idea what this internet thing is, or what these weird hairless monkeys are that are “liking” all their stuff, but the house gets okay wifi so full steam ahead.
In a changing media-landscape where post-broadcast online binge viewing is the growing trend for adults and children alike, we think this balance is a powerful way to encourage repeat viewings and the maintain steady audience growth beyond initial broadcast. Humour and imagination brings viewers in on an episode by episode basis. Mystery and wonder keeps them around all season long.
Funding Consideration
Our team has successfully received Canadian Media Fund support for previous projects, and we full intend on apply for CMF funding for Monster Space Bungalow with the support of our broadcasting partner.
As well, we wanted to include one note on funding that won’t be unique to our project, but is unique to our production location. As an Alberta based production company, we have worked alongside Alberta Film in the past. They offer the Alberta Production Grant, a program that covers a significant percentage of production costs and is scalable up to the requirements of a feature films.
The media production market is growing in the province, but in many ways is still in its infancy (compared to BC or Ontario). As the provincial government increases funding and development of the industry, we’ve identified an opportunity for homegrown producers to join the momentum. From our past experience, we’ve seen that the market is less saturated than many other provinces. The province is eager to invest, but the work isn’t always available (particularly in the Winter months). So this is where Monster Space Bungalow has an advantage. We’ve structured the show to utilize our unique production market, but without the constraints of weather or daylight hours. Arguably, we are better off shooting in the winter months (the time period our sample short was produced) as crews and resources are more readily available - plus we don’t need daylight in space.
To proceed in developing Monster Space Bungalow, Alberta Film looks to distribution and broadcast agreements as their ultimate threshold. Therefore, a partnership or letter of interest has becomes our first step in bringing these crazy monsters to life. We will be working to secure a number of under-utilized local and regional funding models which we have partnered with in the past, as well as private investment, and competitive national grants.
Episode Concepts / Treatment
1.1
When Art startles Ollie in the middle of one of his musical jams, Ollie tries to save face by claiming that his embarrassing screaming was part of the song he was writing. The lie spins wildly out of control, taking them on a peculiar adventure that introduces us to the power of imagination and creativity in the bungalow.
NOTE: The attached script is from this short digital sample, and would represent one single narrative (the A plot of an AB plot driven episode). As well, despite the funding source for the initial digital short sample, Sticks & Stones does currently retain full rights to the Monster Space Bungalow IP.
1.2
As we all know, every house has a heater to provide the house with heat, a water tank to provide it with water, and a colorater to provide the house the colour. When the Bungalow’s colorater breaks right in the middle of Art’s painting practice (plunging it into spooky black-and-white-ness), the monsters leap into action without consulting each other in any way. Ollie makes a deal with Sarah, a whipsmart monster who’s gifted with mechanics, to help fix the machine, while Art makes a visit to Space Whale, who might know more about the broken colorater than he lets on.
1.3
The bungalow keeps getting cat-burgled, which is confusing on more levels than anyone can keep track of. When Ollie’s beloved trumpet goes missing, he decides to go full Home Alone, rigging up the house with increasingly elaborate traps. Art becomes concerned for Ollie's devolving mental state, while Sarah can’t help but enabling him as she enjoys building the traps with him so much. Space Whale documents the conflict with his video camera, and in doing so stumbles into the curious truth of the matter.
1.4
The house drifts through a rift in the space time continuum, and as it does, Art gets into a stray two minute time-loop (think Groundhog Day but two minutes instead of twenty four hours). He has to work with Ollie (who somehow picks up on what’s going on based on Art’s crazed shouting every time he pops into existence), to escape the loop.
1.5
The question of what exactly Art is becomes a little clearer when another stranded member of her species shows up on the Bungalow’s doorstep. Art and Ollie’s friendship is tested with the new monster — Tim’s — arrival. Meanwhile, Sarah thinks the new monster’s presence might be the secret to their finding a new home. Space Whale gets the flu and loses touch with any semblance of reality.
And who are we to tell this ridiculous collection of stories about these wonderful monsters?
We're Sticks & Stones
We're an award winning creative content firm from beautiful, brisk Alberta. We make web-series, videos, and animations for clients across the country. We're good at turning information into stories (and super consumable, web-friendly, occasionally viral content), and we never forget to bring the focus back to the people at the heart of the matter. Our last personal project is HACKED, a podcast about hacking and underground technology. HACKED was recently optioned for television development by Network Entertainment in Vancouver. We've gotten a taste for developing long-form, creative, episodic content, and we're excited for the chance to tell stories that encourage the themes of creativity and self discovery that mean so much to us.
We started Monster Space Bungalow as a gift to our production designer's newborn baby daughter, and in creating the early short film that this pitch is based on, completely fell in love with this world, and the ideas we get to explore with these characters. We'd love to bring this idea to life , and are excited by the chance to do so. Please don't hesitate to ask anything about how we'd approach production on the show, our company, previous projects, etc.
You can learn more about us, view our key creative team, and see our work here.
Thanks for reading. See you in the Bungalow.