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.