a story outline attempt

Hey, here's a general story outline I wrote up based on our ship/kraken/ducky idea so far. I thought it would be good to have a more solid sequence of events to work off of rather than operating in a relative vacuum. Feel free to come up with changes/critiques of this outline by commenting or making a new post. 

--->

We fade in to the shiny, sparkly, golden swan floating on the water at sunset. The swan is a live character and doing its swan thing.

We zoom out and the scene becomes framed within a circle. The circle/swan shot gets swiped/transitioned down to reveal a big eye. We realize that it's the pirate captain and that he had been looking at the swan through his telescope, as we zoom out to see his whole face and his skull and bones hat. 

He grins, and we zoom out again to see him gesture/gibber at his pirate/penguin crew to go full speed towards the swan. The huge (but maybe cartoonish/simplified) ship unfurls its skull and bones sails and moves in for the kill.

The swan is doing its thing until it happens to glance behind it and see the ship heading straight for it. We cut to the front deck of the ship and see that a crewman/penguin is manning a net harpoon gun. We cut back to the swan, who freaks out and begins to fly away. As it flies into the sky, the gun is fired and ensnares the swan, who plops back down onto the water.

From underwater, we get a POV shot of the silhouettes of the ship moving up alongside the swan. We get a growling noise and bubbles float upward: something big is watching.

Above water, the pirates haul up the ensnared swan above the center deck of the ship, maybe with some pulleys and ropes, or a crane. The captain grins/laughs maniacally and gestures/points towards the swan as lightning flashes behind him and a storm begins. The deck below the swan opens to reveal a cargo hold the swan will be lowered into, where a bunch of pirate treasure already sits.

As the swan starts to get lowered towards the opening, bubbles start bubbling, then foaming around/off to one side of the ship, rocking and shaking it. The Kraken rises out of the water with a roar and the a vortex whirlpool slowly starts to swirl around from where it arose. 

The Kraken slams some tentacles onto the ship and its deck, grasping it, while other tentacles remain flailing around. Below deck, some crewmen witness the Kraken's beaked mouth and tongue snapping at them through a cannon/oar hole. The Kraken is huge, but not huge enough to simply capsize and sink the big pirate ship.

On the deck, the pirates desperately try to break the grasping tentacles grip with whatever they got: swords, wood, barrels, buckets, bottles, pistols, fish etc. They also try to fend off the tentacles from grabbing the swan. As they battle, the storm gets stormier and the whirlpool grows, which begins to pull the ship-Kraken into it.

The captain then realizes that they are getting pulled into the whirlpool and barks some gibberish to the crew. The ship puts out oars from its sides and begins rowing out of the whirlpool. On its side of the ship, the Kraken gags/pulsates and its eyes pop in surprise as some crewmen from inside the ship ram an oar out of the oarhole and into the tongue-writhing/battling mouth of the Kraken.

The Kraken thus eyeballs the ensnared swan and finally grabs it with a free tentacle. It pulls the swan from the ship (maybe breaking off some masts/sails with it), before detaching from the ship and spinning away from the ship with the whirlpool current. Both the ship and Kraken are now fully caught in the quickly-swirling whirlpool.

The captain sees the swan escaping and moves towards the harpoon gun to load and man it, as the crew furiously tries to row out of the whirlpool. Meanwhile the Kraken, on the opposite side of the whirlpool from the ship, makes ready to eat/stuff the swan into its gaping/snapping mouth.

The captain aims and fires the harpoon gun (maybe 3 times, the first 2 being epic misses that distract the Kraken) and manages to ensnare and blow the swan out of the Kraken's grasp and out of the now-deep whirlpool. 

But as the captain momentarily gloats in his victory, he quickly realizes that the ship is about to tip and capsize, and that he is going face-first into the center hole of the whirlpool that we zoom into.

We then zoom out to reveal a drain and the empty, wet bathtub around it with ship and pirate toys strewn about the hole. A mother calls from offscreen telling her kid to get dinner before it's cold. The kid replies and throws a yellow rubber ducky back into the bathtub along with the other toys. We hear the kid's footsteps running off.

Then suddenly, a Kraken tentacle pops out of the drain hole, grabs the duck, and then pulls it back into the drain hole. Iris/transition out, The End.

---> I didn't include the 2nd ship in this version because I had a hard time coming up with ways to make it important and not-redundant to the story beyond being another ship to do battle with. And just as an opinion, I felt that our current NURBs minions would be a more in place visually on a fantasy/cartoony-esque pirate ship, whereas having the good NURBs on a modern ocean liner/cargo boat, next to a pirate ship, with NURB aliens on both ships, just seemed like it would be so strange from the start that it would distract from all the action/plot afterwards.

I may be very well wrong though, so if somebody else could come up with another story version that incorporates the 2nd ship and gives it more motivation than just existing, that'd be great.

I'll try and get some storyboards up to show what I think some moments from this story outline would look like, camera angles and all.