Applied Animation - Week 4

During this week we decided to press on with getting in contact with the care homes and people we wanted to interview. Meg sent an email out to the care home explaining what we are doing and what we were requesting, as well as who we are.

The email was sent to Headingley Hall which wasn't an alzheimers specific care home but had a couple of alzheimers patients as residents. However we were told that we should probably find a care home that specifically caters to Alzheimers suffers. So we attempted to call Nestfeild Lodge a care home that is tailored to look after dementia patients. We called them instead of emailing in an attempt to get an immediate response which we got and after talking to them we thought we might actually get a chance to go to the care home. However after a week we had still not heard back, so during the week we decided to interview people around college.

We started by interviewing Dan and Meg so i asked them these questions:

When did you find out your family member had Alzheimers?
Do you feel like they're the same person?
How has it affected your family and have any relationships changed because of this?
Before your family member got alzheimers what did you know about it and how has your view changed?
Do you have any stories from before and after the alzheimers?
What was the hardest thing to experience or witness?

We mainly wanted to collect stories and experiences as they would be the main fuel for writing a story and narrative into our documentary. We found that this was actually a really beneficial way to receive primary research and decided to make posters advertising around uni to get people to contact us for more recordings.

This was our poster it was put together quickly so that we could get it up and contacted quickly.

Within a couple of days we started to receive emails from people and i was able to ask a few people i knew if they would be available for its to record win the coming week.

Our first recording was with Kat Williams and she talked about how her grandmother currently has alzheimers. At the beginning of the recording we made sure to ask first for consent on the usage of the recording and then the clarification that if a question felt too personal or intrusive they were not obliged to answer it.

The recordings have started to really give us an idea of how people experience and deal with alzheimers.