Applied Animation - week 2

During our second week we had Megan Ratcliff join our group. I have mixed feelings about the addition of another person as we had begun considering an idea already at this time but Dan wasn't feeling 100% for the war stories idea so with meg we went back to the drawing board for ideas.

We wanted to keep to the sketchy vague style that we had previously talked about and thought how such a medium could be used to convey a story while informing others as a documentary. Isolation and loss were two main factors we wanted to use for this idea, or as the core points to drive our ideas as to get the emotional attachment. Humans are social creatures and to witness and experience isolation is a difficult thing wether its physically or mentally. This led for our thought process to consider human suffering, not in a disturbing manner but in a way of helping to understand. We came up with two ideas one for a documentary on slavery from the perspective of the slave or a character witnessing the experience or a documentary covering Alzheimer's. We chose to go with the Alzheimers idea as both Dan and Meg have had family members who have suffered from the disease and we envisioned the traditional animation rubbing out and vanishing to try and convey what the message is about and to get across the idea of fading away.

Below are some sketches i made while we were talking about ideas and i was trying to grasp the struggle that this disease puts on people, albeit with out prior knowledge and purely based on what i currently know.






















We understand that this is a very sensitive topic and with the addition of a new member i suggested we have a schedule to keep ourselves on track.

I organised the information into overall targets and general roles within those targets and then we assigned roles for each person. This will hopefully give us more focus and organisation to the project so if one person is slacking or falling behind the others can help push them along.

With our initial research we knew we were going to have to tread carefully because we don't want to hurt anyones feelings by misrepresentation. So we first had to find out the clear differences between Dementia and Alzheimers. Simply, all alzheimers is dementia but not all dementia is alzheimers because alzheimers is one of the main causes of dementia.

While doing our research nothing quite jumped out at us for ideas and our understanding was very shallow so to try and grasp the concept more we watched a documentary by Louie Theroux on Alzheimers called Extreme Love that looked at the relationships between carers, family members and patients and how they were coping and how their relationship was changing. It was very eye opening to see the varying degrees of alzheimers based on the different stages of progression and how different people came to accept it or deny it as one woman who was far into the later stages, wasn't receiving any more visits from the family because they couldn't bare to see her in that state which is something i can only feel sorry for and pity because its moments like these that make you aware of how severe this disease is. i also while scrolling through Facebook happened upon a video of a man experiencing the moment of his own mother forgetting who he was. This hit me incredibly and i couldn't watch the whole video, to forget is to be isolated and its that isolation we want to focus on the pain of having someone there but they aren't, the concept of a ghost comes to mind, to not be able to 'touch' a person again, someone who you were incredibly close with, it made me question wether or not doing this topic was a smart idea. I have never had anyone in my family suffer from alzheimers  thankfully, but this meant i didn't understand it until i saw those videos and they were strong and impactful, however not animated like the short 'Bampa' which is a short after effects animation telling the story from the view of a son watching his elderly father deteriorate. The message carried the same weight as the other documentuarys but the animation style didn't quite hold it up i felt, i felt it was too mechanical and planned it didnt show the raw emotion that was felt from the speaker, as if it was contained and not truly released what was being wanted to say so i hope with our plans to work in charcoal we get the deeper message across with the more hand drawn and human touch.

We also assigned rolls during this week and I'm to work on the visual development mainly so i started my research by gathering photos and pictures of our family members through the decades.
Although these are family members that don't or didn't suffer from autism we wanted to keep that personal feeling strong so we drew inspiration from the appearances of our relatives. It also gave us an interesting perspective of how a person grows and changes with age because with some early concepts and ideas we had we considered showing different stages of the characters life.

Applied Animation - Week 1

For this years applied animation we are to work in groups of 2 - 3 and create a documentary animation based on one of four themes, history, Sustainability, science and Politics. It was recommended that we group with people who had an overlapping interest in these themes. This meant certain people who i had previously talked to about working with i wouldn't work with because we had different interests.lol

The themes i found mostly interesting were Science and history as they were ones where i felt it would be possible to avoid opinion based topics as to avoid offending/insulting people, i also find subjects such as politics incredibly dull as i don't follow politics very strongly.

I chose to work with Daniel Goodman as he is a talented 2d and 3d animator and really knows how to use maya so if we decided to work in 3d he could assist me in what i lack.

While talking to dan he wanted to make an animation that was very narrative driven and focused on an emotional pull which i agree with as when watching documentuarys you have more interest and investment when something feels personal so if we could make a story that makes people think, this could be me or someone i know, we think the animation would have more impact. So we discussed ideas that focused on telling a story which led to Dan mentioning about how his grandfather fought in the D-Day Landings and was always telling stories of the war. We thought these would make a great grounding for a narrative documentary on the second world war. we looked into research for the topic looking at old photographs from the library as well as trying to get in contact with elderly family members.

I thought my Granny had some medals from the war from family members so i asked her if she knew anything or remembered anything from those times, but unfortunately i was mistaken and she actually had stories that had been passed down from the first world war which unfortunately weren't quite what we were looking for.

Dan had a strong idea of how he wanted the animation to look with it being rough and sketchy hand drawn animation as it gives a much more personal touch to the animation when its hand drawn and we have 15 weeks to work on this project so we can put a lot of time into the creation of our animation.

Considering the animation style will be rough and sketchy as well as hand drawn it made me consider the time and detail that goes into the animations of Joanna Quinns and Glen Keanes animation styles and drawings. the extra lines the emotion and character as well as the pencil marks all leave further impact as well as make you feel the meaning being put into the message.

With this in mind i tried visualing how it could look very roughly.

Pencil sketchs with a lot of extra marks but enough definition to tell what is going on in the scene we also considered the possibility of working in charcoal as it would give an even rawer feel to the animation.