Applied Animation - Week 1

Unfortunately i was ill for the briefing but Guy messaged me saying he would like to work with me so i agreed. The reason i agreed to work with Guy is because i value his character design and pre production skills in general. My main skills consist of more technical production based skills which are important but only when based on a good solid pre production foundation. This is why i wanted to work with Guy because our skills complement each other nicely. I would have loved to work with Brenda again like with character and narrative but i thought it would be best to try working with different people. Also Brenda was interested in a different side to documentary animation than i was.

We spent some time brainstorming ideas when i got back into uni. I suggested the idea of animating stories from grandparents as my granddad always tells stories about the war and about being segregated from the other kids due to him being Jewish. He has told me these stories over and over and i have a good visual representation of them already built up in my head.

Our plan is to go round and record him telling us these stories so that we can start to deduce a script and a visual representation to these stories.

We have in mind already the tone for our documentary. Which is very low key lighting to give the dark mood of the war and to really focus on how he felt rather than facts about the era. This is an important point to mention, we want our documentary to inform the audience through an emotional response rather than with facts. Therefore we want our documentary to be narrative driven rather than more of an info graphic.

In our opinion, we think having a strong short narrative would impact the viewer more than a factual documentation of the events would.

Whilst thinking about some of the stories my grandad has told me, i started making some rough early concept sketches of how the stories could be visualized.

 

Since most of my granddad's stories were from world war 2 we did some research into world war 2 and found some pictures from around that time for inspiration.

 

When researching war animations i found some interesting short animations. The first one is called 'Paths Of Hate', this is an animation about the pure hatred between soldiers on opposite sides of the war and it almost parodies the hatred in my opinion.

I found this an interesting idea to maybe explore in our documentary, about how hatred, or rather ignorance is the cause of many painful past experiences. As shown in 'Paths Of Hate', hatred is a driving force, but only towards negative outcomes.

I also really like the visual style of this animation, although for our documentary we have strongly sided towards a more traditional style of animation, which would suit the sensitive theme of our documentary.

With the visual style of our documentary animation in mind, an animation i immediately thought of as having a relevant visual style is an animation called 'Sea Child'. I first saw this animation at Manchester animation festival in 2015 and the visual style really appealed to me.

This method is using charcoal with what i suspect is watercolour. 'Sea Child' takes a similar tone to what were aiming for, it is about a girl who is coming of age, which is a sensitive issue. The visual style of using the charcoal and watercolour medium, suits this tone and complements it.

We also talked about implementing a more solid drawing style into our animation. As with old disney drawings or drawings from old masters such as raphael and pontormo. This drawing style mixed with the medium of animating in charcoal and watercolour would be an interesting combination and one that would suit the theme of our animation

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This could almost lead us to Joanna Quinn and i guess it does as the style i described is roughly the style she employs. However what we're after is edging more towards a low key, rough charcoal visual representation, more like that of sea child than of Joanna Quinn.