Applied Animation - Week 5

This week we did more interviews this time with two more people whom i knew, my old flat mate Hayleigh and a work colleague Megan.

Hayleigh was only 13 when her grandmother got the disease and so her mother and her became full time carers for her. Having to live with her for a period of time. Hayleigh explained that this confused her grandmother because she thought she was being burgled at first and would mistake Hayleigh for her mother and this would further cause concerns. However Hayleigh still felt that there was still something of her grandmother there as she would have times when she remembered them and it was easier.

In comparison however in Megans interview she talked about how her grandma just had a horrible decline and how her father ignored the early signs because he didn't want to admit it was happening. She explained that her grandmother really started to decline after the loss of her husband and began to imagine that he was sitting in his chair and would try to talk to humbug would obviously not get a response. also in the early stages she would repeat the same phrase once every 15 minutes and this escalated to every 5 minutes. The most striking point i felt was the opinion that they weren't the same person because they had lost so much.

As well as the recordings from within college we also listened to a recording that Dan got of his mum talking about a lot of their family members as the dementia is common in their family. In the recording his mum talks about how they found her standing in the middle of the street in the rain at 2 in the morning, this was the point that they new they had to get her into a care home. This was a story board we roughly put together for the idea.

All these stories and interviews were giving us loads of ideas but we were continuously faint to pin any one down.
We tried to story board a scene from the story about the woman in the rain and we were coming up with some nice visualisation but I felt that what Dan and Meg were working towards wasn't what the brief was asking, it was becoming too detached from the source material as they were suggesting to merge the stories together taking key elements from different stories to try and string together a narrative. I was very adamant about not combining stories as they would result in a very confusing narrative because Alzheimers and dementia happen across a very wide spectrum so the stories weren't matching up we couldn't have a story of a woman who has suffered from alzheimers so greatly that she can only mumble words and then at another point show a quirk or idiosyncrasy that conflicts with how the character previously behaved, as far as the story would go it wouldn't of made sense nor would the character and that would of caused a loss of an emotional connection to the characters ploy.

Dan and Meg considered the idea that the animation might not even need characters but this led away from what we were aiming for with a narrative focus and emotive response as well as going into a realm of animation that is not my strong point, abstract. However they said it was more to make sure we understood that our animation had to be about loss and isolation.

Steve suggested we watch a new documentary by Ross Hogg 'Isabella' which is about his mother and her alzheimers and it wasn't a very clean cut interview or documentary. A lot of white noise at the start along with close ups and muffled sound with ink droplets blacking out the screen. All of these elements are features that portray the concept and idea of Alzheimers strongly, the white noise blanking out the language, and the ink droplets covering up her memories. In the film Isabella laughs and at times jokes about little things but then she says, "i can't remember..." This line hits very heavily as we've just been amused by this old woman who actually has this terrible thing happening to her and she nor us can do anything to stop it.

https://vimeo.com/134735280
This is the link to the isabella documentary

I met with Dan to try and get a story figured out, (meg couldn't make it but we had to come up with something) we listened to the recordings and tried to come up with a narrative by noting down the things said in the interviews. Whilst we listened to Megans we got a lot of strong information and ideas and i had an idea that could work. I was apprehensive at first as both Dan and Meg seemed to have these big plans for a very complex narrative and i thought it was just getting too cluttered. It wasn't focused, it didn't tell a story and it wasn't causing an emotional response, so i suggested we make it simple. Take it to one key factor and focus on that point to tell the story. The point i focused on was the repetition of phrases, something that happens in the early stages of Alzheimers and something that happened to means grandmother. Her father ignored this fact and it left her in a worse state than she could of been. Both of these factors could be included in the animation but it could all be contained to one room or within a short time space and finally transitioning to the care home where she is still repeating the same phrase or words but much more consistently.

Thankfully Dan liked the idea and we began brainstorming and taking the idea further trying to storyboard it. However we were unsure as to how to present the story. to make the animation great we need to have expert execution that will leave a strong impact on people and make them think.