Thirsty Planet is a charity water brand that has donated over £1.9 million, helping to provide 1.35 million people with clean, safe water. This is a very important issue because people in third world countries often get ill from drinking dirty water that can contain many diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio. 'More than 2 million people die each year due to waterborne diseases, most of them are children below 5 years of age.'
The reason they drink dirty water is because there is not enough clean water accessible to them. Thirsty Planet are trying to resolve this issue with the help of pump aid, which is providing water pumps with clean water to communities who need it.
I would imagine most people are aware of how important water is anyway, we need it to survive and its one of the fundamental attributes for life. However to get a greater idea of just how important water is and how important the issue of providing clean water to those in need is, i watched a documentary called 'Flow:For The Love Of Water', this gave me a better insight into the issue. Even though the documentary is mostly about the water crisis in the US, a lot of it is still relevant.
4 pence is donated to pump aid for each litre of Thirsty Planet water sold. This is an interesting and clever idea because we take water for granted as clean water is commonly available to us easily and effectively. So with money being donated to the pump aid charity when buying water, this starts to build a healthy system of helping those without access to clean water by buying clean water.
I am happy with the idea of collaboration, i think it is a much better, more efficient way of producing work. When choosing a group, i wanted to make sure that the people i was working with were after roughly the same end product i would be happy with. I think this is the most important part of collaborative work. When everyone is working towards different end products, resistance and hostility is probable and the end product will be unsatisfactory due to everyone diverging instead of converging to a common end goal.
in the first meeting with the group, we settled on a few things. At first we though of making an app and i was very interested in this idea, to put my programming skills to use. However after discovering the deadline is roughly 4 weeks away we decided to compromise and make a short animation with accompanying posters.
We decided, because of the branding and theme of the brief, the animation would be suited more to a cut out style of animation, we could do this in two ways. Either in photoshop, animating over a texture, or traditional cut out animation with coloured card and other materials under a sheet of glass/thick acetate.
We were brainstorming ideas for the short animation. We thought it would be better to have a short narrative rather than more of an info-matic with lots of facts. This is because the age range specified in the brief is 18-24 year olds and all of us being in that age range we decided that we would be more affected by a short narrative about Thirsty Water. Rather than a display of facts as this would bore most people and would not hold their attention.
One of the key ideas we came up with was that we could personify the water pump into an elephant. This idea came about because the pumps provided by pump aid to those in need are referred to as elephant pumps. We decided on a short narrative, describing the elephants coming to those who need clean water and supplying them with water. Keeping the narrative simple is another consideration that we kept in mind whilst mapping out the story. This is because we want to hold the viewers attention and holding the viewers attention for a short amount of time is a lot easier.
The day after the first meeting, i met with the other animators in the group to plan out the storyboard. We had designs from the illustration student of the human characters and the elephant character. The elephant character designs were perfect but the human designs were abit too complicated, considering we were thinking about cut out animation. We notified her of this and she is re-doing the designs to be abit simpler to animate. This demonstrates that good communication between everyone is important for efficient workflow.
We decided it would be best for us to do the storyboard but we will review it with the whole group before it is finalized. This is important to keep everyone working towards the end product.
When creating the storyboard we decided to add a baby elephant and some children into the narrative to give it more appeal. Sticking to the appointed colour scheme on the brief was an important consideration when creating the storyboard as we want all the colours to work together.
Overall i am happy with the project so far and the narrative we have produced.
No comments:
Post a Comment