Applied Animation - Week 4

We did alot of primary research this week. First of all we emailed a care home in headingly asking if we could talk to some of the carers and the families of residents with Alzheimers and also spend some time with the people suffering with Alzheimers. We worked together on the email although meg had the most input on it since she is the head of the research side of the project.

Unfortunately our request was declined, they said we should contact a home especially for people with Alzheimers so that's exactly what we did next.

We contacted a specialized Dementia care home in leeds called Nesfield lodge. Instead of emailing them like the last care home, we decided to ring them. This is a better approach in our opinion because the person can get a more rounded impression of us over the phone whereas emails, despite being sharper and more to the point, are just text on the screen.

At first the home seemed interested in our idea and was willing to help us but we kept getting passed to people further up and they said they would phone us back. They phoned Meg back a few days later and gave her an email of someone to contact who could help us.

Due to this process taking a while we though of other ways to get material to use for our animation. We realized the most obvious thing to do was to record me and Meg talking about our experience with family members who had Alzheimers.

To record this we went to the sound studio and guy asked us both questions relating to the subject. I think this went fairly well but most of the things we talked about were already mentioned to the group previously.

Because of this we thought of widening our research but to take advantage of the uni community and so we designed and put up posters around uni to prompt people to come talk to us about their experiences with family members/loved ones with Alzheimer's disease.

We looked at other posters around the uni with a similar premise, to get an idea of what works and what doesn't work as much in terms of making the poster inviting.

We made the poster and pinned them to most of the notice boards around uni. We got an email from a student the next day and i replied to her but unfortunately she didn't reply back.

We finally organized an interview with a girl who Guy was working with for the responsive module, her grandmother currently has Alzheimer's.

We wrote down some questions and agreed it would be a better idea for just one of us to ask the questions, as we wanted to keep it simple and professional. However more than that we wanted to make the person feel comfortable so sometimes i would cut in with an unscheduled question just to make it feel like more of a normal conversation.

We went to the sound booth to record the conversation, we got some good stories and insights from her. We made sure to get her consent on the recording so that we definitely have permission to use it in our animation and for the animation to be submitted to film festivals.

In terms of ideas for the story we were struggling to come up with a good base idea last week and we're collecting alot of research currently. Therefore we decided to wait until we have a lot of primary research and use that to work on the story.

I caught a documentary on channel 4 on monday called 'trouble with my dad'. This programme was about a comedian, David Baddiel, dealing with his father's dementia.

Watching this was interesting and gave me an insight into the more aggressive forms of dementia. It is also important to note that dementia effects everyone differently, its not just people forgetting things. For example someone might because obsessed with a trivial task or may repeat a sentence constantly, others might seem to be more present and feel more 'there'.

Doing these interviews is a good way to get a wide range of research, as we will get told the different ways different people have been affected by Alzheimers.