Also we wanted a third member because having more members to a project enhances the possible outcome. This is because three people can produce more work than two people.
Secondly, we have changed the main basis of the animation to be about Alzheimer's disease. The reason for this is that, although the idea of animating to my grandads stories of the war could be an interesting idea. I think making a documentary about Alzheimer will be a more personal and impactful animated documentary as both me and Meg have experienced family members with the disease.
To start off the research we were unaware of what the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia was. With some quick research we found out that Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, this is why people often use both terms interchangeably.
Alzheimer's is a horrible disease in which the brain essentially deteriorates over time. Technically speaking, the death of nerve cells and loss of brain tissue. This causes the victims of the disease to have a loss of short term memory and eventually become a shell of their former self. This can obviously be very hard for family and loved ones.
As i mentioned before in my previous blog post, we want this documentary to be very emotionally impactful and communicate to the viewer the emotional consequences of the disease rather than the scientific facts of the disease. Although researching into the disease to learn more about it is important to be able to understand the disease and to make the documentary accurate.
We are planning to get a lot of primary research from family members who have experienced Alzheimer's first hand through their family members. We are also going to get in contact with care homes to see if we can ask questions to families who have relatives suffering with the disease.
Although we are planning all this primary research, we still have to tread carefully and be sensitive to the people being affected directly or indirectly by the disease. As it is a horrible and life changing disease that has a huge impact on people especially family members and we don't wish to cause them any pain through asking them questions about the disease. We have to bear this in mind whilst deciding on the questions and it makes the manner in which we ask them the questions important also.
To organise our time efficiently Guy created a timetable for us to work to. We all went through and decided as a group which tasks would be best suited to each member of the group. However we decided that although the tasks may be assigned to one individual all of us will review the work done on this task and the work will be peer reviewed constantly by everyone in our group. This is a good way to work because it keeps everyone in check with the common end goal.
Under the resources in the module content, i had a look through the animated documentary blog and found an interesting animation called ‘Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck (Kaputt)’. I particularly like the process of animation used which is a process of erasing each frame as it is being animated which leaves a sort of onion skin effect.
This adds an element of feeling lost or confused to the animation which would fit perfectly with our theme of Alzheimer's.
As a way of giving us more ideas and learning more about the way the disease affects people, we watched a Lois Theroux documentary on Dementia. This documentary was extremely relevant to our research because this focused extensively on how the disease effects family members and loved ones of people with the disease.
Whilst watching the documentary, i took a lot of notes and started visualising some ideas for the narrative of our documentary.
I got some important points out of the documentary. Firstly the reason people with dementia are put into care homes is that the family/loved ones are no longer able to keep the person safe. When the Dementia patient is admitted to the care home, it can seem very strange to them and sometimes in advanced cases the patient is unaware of where they are and how they got there. I deduced that as a coping method for them being in this strange place and with people they may not recognize, the dementia patient may assign people and places of the past to those in the current setting.
The carers in the home often go along with the patient's delusions. For example in the Lois Theroux documentary, the carers would often let a patient, who had been a dentist all his life, check their teeth to distract him from trying to exit the home. Going along with the patients delusions may seem like it's encouraging them to live in a delusional world however doing this avoids causing the patient unnecessary pain.
Two main points that i think is important to bear in mind whilst planning the narrative for our animation is that firstly, the main theme/issue tying in with the disease is confusion and/or isolation. When a person constantly forgets things this can lead to confusion and the person can feel isolated due to feelings of being disconnected from their family and loved ones because of the disease.
A second important point to note is that the disease is potentially more emotionally damaging to the people that care about the dementia patient than the patient themselves.
Initial concept sketches:
For these initial concept sketches, i thought about how it might feel for the person with dementia and how it might feel from the perspective of a family member. I thought about how in the Lois Theroux documentary a woman with dementia couldn't recognize various items and had no idea what they were used for. I represented this by a person handing an item to the character and it transforming into lots of squiggly lines to show the inability of the brain to recognize the item.
We also though of an idea for a opening sequence with a close up shot of the dementia patient's eye. Although this shot is quite a cliche, it would give a more personal feel to the character. We played around with the idea of lots of muffled voices around the character combined with this eye shot. This would convey a sense of isolation and loneliness.
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