Applied Animation - Week 3

This week mainly consisted of developing the research side of the project and coming up with some basic story structures. Guy created a mood board and we each contributed old pictures of relatives. This is a good idea as it builds up the visual library for when designing characters and especially in terms of the clothing and environments. When searching through my parents old pictures i made sure to capture to wide spectrum of what it was like around that time. For example i made sure to get pictures of various subject matter such as environments, objects, experiences, not just people. This is important to get a feel of the world we are creating.

This specific mood board is more for the character design and also based around a sequence that we are thinking will be our base story concept. This concept is the idea that the Alzheimer's patient remembers the past and perhaps holds on to that feeling of security and comfort in certain points of their lives as the confusion caused by their condition has turned them into a shell of what they once were.

Early in the week we had a meeting where we could just bring all of our research together and talk through everyone's ideas. This also consisted of watching relevant short animations and taking notes of the things we liked about them all. We were really struggling to get any interesting ideas for the story so we began just sketching out concept sketches to bring inspiration. We all liked the idea of linking patients with Alzheimer's to the idea of a child being lost and confused. We feel that the two experiences could be similar from what we have gathered about Alzheimer's disease.

At first i came up with an idea of a boy being lost at sea on a raft and when he finally reaches shore, the shore is just blackness and there is nothing anywhere and the child is confused about where he is.


When developing this idea further i took inspiration from one of the mood board pictures displaying a child with his parents at the sea. I thought it was a brilliant picture, i like how the child is almost turned around to look at the camera whilst the parents don't acknowledge the picture being taken, making the scene have more of a connection between the child and the viewer.

I used the idea of this image to produce a short storyboard sequence in which the parents are swinging the child by the arms and then the child looks back, almost at the camera. The parents then almost disappear or smudge away (since we're using charcoal as our medium), the child kneels down and starts to draw in the sand, oblivious to anything else. He then realizes he is all alone and seems confused, he starts to look around with a panicky look. He then curls up into a ball on the sand and a wave washes over him, transitioning to a carer putting a blanket over an Alzheimer's patient.

In addition to the photograph this idea developed from a previous sketch sequence i visualized previously based on the idea that the patient is exhausted from confusion and therefore curls up into a symbolically safe position to present the idea that the patient wants safety.

We also thought it could be interesting to have the world build around the patient when transitioning scenes, for example the backgrounds, objects and people build from the patient. Guy showed us a short animation called 'Out of Sight' which employs this idea in the context of a blind girl trying to find her way through unknown areas.

 

The basis of the idea is having a narrative which combines the child and Alzheimer's patient. Although We like this idea, we still want to put a lot of emphasis on how the disease effects family members and people around the patients. Although combining all three story aspects could feel a bit busy for a short animation i think it could work very well if done right.

Later on in the week we all went to guys house to watch some movies together which were relevant to the project. The first film we watched was called 'Wrinkles', it was a 2d animation film with a narrative based around Alzheimer's. Many of the ideas we had already thought of were incorporated into the film but in different ways. For example i mentioned previously about showing the similarity between the disease and being lost as a child. In one sequence of the film, when he first enters the home, there is a flashback to the first day of school and him feeling scared and confused much like he feels when he first enters the home.

Parts of the film connected with our previous factual research about Alzheimer's disease, such as when he tries to use his spoon as a knife because he has forgotten the individual uses of the cutlery and cannot distinguish between them.

Wrinkles also uses flashbacks or hallucinations a fair amount, such as the woman who always thinks she is on a train staring out the window smoking a cigarette, when really she's just sat in her room staring into the garden area of the home. This re-enforces our idea of having flashbacks or hallucinations of our characters past.

The next film we watched was 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' which is one of my favorite films and is relevant to our project in terms of cinematography and screenplay. The story is about the characters having part of their memory erased so the story is still loosely related to our topic but we picked this film to watch mainly because of the screenplay.

The atmosphere of traveling through memories is brilliantly established in this film. It manages to visualize memories and capture the mood of each memory simply and effectively. The combination of intimate, sensitive memories and light hearted, more humorous memories. I think humor is important to incorporate into our animation, not too much to overthrow the serious tone of the sensitive topic but to apply a lighter side to approaching the disease would make the viewer more involved with the narrative. A relevant quote from Walt Disney is "For every laugh there should be a tear."

The composition in this film and the transitional sequences are very inspiring and well done. The transitions and camera techniques used make it so the film flows seamlessly. Some other techniques are used to make the film more pleasing to watch and more visually stimulating, for example the use of negative space.

The shot shown below demonstrates my point:

Creating interesting negative space in a shot enhances the visual vibrancy and creates a more interesting composition. I am looking to apply this knowledge of negative space in our animation and make sure the shots are interesting, this knowledge will come into play when story boarding and when planning the shots.

Compositional techniques also help tell the story. Using a Quentin Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs as an example. In the first shot of the opening scene, the camera does a circular pan around the table to establish the characters and keeps everything very tight through the use of close ups, this is possibly used to first introduce the characters and to then to show the serious tone of their conversation.

What i like about this opening shot is that it is put together so that just the conversation is being filmed, their surroundings are not shown at all within this first shot which makes the viewer feel intensely involved with the conversation.

When the topic of conversation changes, the intensity is lowered slightly and the shots evolve into mid shots.