Applied Animation 5: Descisions

Today we decided on the final interviews we'd use for the animation, we chose 5 clips from 4 interviewees with a focus on the funnier ones. We also have two clips that are less funny but are good interview clips.

First is an interview with my Granddad, i got a great clip of him talking about how the war influenced what he liked to eat. We weren't sure of what we wanted him to look like or his setting but we ended up choosing an old fisherman, this was because of his grimsby accent and his relaxed tone seemed similar to that of someone by the sea fishing. Of all of the designs chosen, i feel most unsure about this one, but i like the variation of age groups.

Next is my nephew, Ethan, who gave en extremely cute interview. For this we thought it would be funny to put him in a position of power, an our idea for him was to put him in an elegant office with a lot of mahogony wood and books etc, and make him out to be some kind of University professor. This will be funny because of the naivety of the interview contrasting with the setting. Once again we felt that having someone out of the usual age range would add some nice variety to our animation.

After this we have Greta's Parents, particularly her mum, talking about how she loves making food for a lot of people because its satisfying and you get a lot of compliments. Because the audio recorder that was used didn't record in very good quality, and because they're from Lithuania and have a strong eastern European accent we thought astronauts would work well, as it gives a reason for not so great audio quality if they're being recorded through some kind of intercom system, it seemed fitting as Russia had a very extensive space program, and the accents seemed quite similar, we also felt that it added to the fact that because they aren't speaking english and are from another country, being astronauts gives an obvious impression that these people are far away.

After this we have an interview with my brother, which he didn't take seriously but is none the less very funny. We thought because he talks about meat, and uses relatively graphic terms such as "carcass" and "life blood" we thought it would be funny to make him a surgeon being interviewed in an operating theatre. We went for this because we thought it'd be funny to make someone who is used to being inside people and handling bloody carcasses often talk about meat so passionately when it would most likely put a lot of people off. Furthermore the use of such terms in the interview contrasts with the usual scientific surgeon talk.

Lastly we have Greta's parents again as they have a nice moment where they talk about the interview process and mention having roast pork later. We decided to use this because we thought being aware of the interviews had a nice finish, but also because we thought it would be funny to have their roast pork fly out the airlock in the final seconds.

Next on the list is to create character designs and background designs for all of these scenes. Greta is doing the character design (very quickly might i add) so i shall focus on background design!

Applied Animation 4: The Second Round

This weekend just passed, I went home to interview family, and it was very successful, though some interviews were more successful than others, i got a lot of good audio out of it. The main problem i can see happening is that some of the good stories and information i got from the interviews wont be able to be shown as it is longer than 2 minutes long, particularly with the older people i interviewed. The redesigned questions worked well, though i did go off the script a little bit with the younger interviews so that they understood the questions, i also asked other questions that stemmed off from the original questions, though when i listen back to myself in the audio i often asked closed questions when not using the guide.

Overall i have a lot of great footage, and though i have tried editing it down a bit myself, i feel like i will need to consult with greta before i do any more in order to make my work time more efficient, as i don't want to be editing audio we arent even going to use.

Applied Animation 3: The First Interview

Today i did my first interview, and i got a lot from it. I did the interview with my dad and i knew i would be comfortable trying something for the first time with him, and not only did i get a lot of good footage from him, but i also a lot of good advice. We found that most of my questions were closed, meaning that they could give one answer, or at least too short answers, rather than questions that give longer answers, usually starting with Who, What, When, Why, and How. Furthermore we discussed that we needed some easy introductory questions to get the interviewees prepared to think about and answer questions about a certain subject i.e. food.

Our original questions were;
What is your traditional family dinner?
What does the traditional family dinner mean to you?
Is it important?

I then went back and changed the questions so that it would work better in an interview.

Our redesigned questions were;
What is your favorite food?
Why is it your favorite food?
What would be your favorite food to eat with family?
What is your idea of the the traditional family dinner?
Can you tell me some nostalgic stories about food with family?
What is your perfect dinner? (Covering food, setting, and people)

I shall use these when i interview more family at the weekend.

Applied Animation 2: Planning

Due to the nature of what we want our final animation to be we decided that we would try and start our interviews as soon as possible, and so we created a timetable to work to for this project.

So far i feel like we haven't done the best job at following this plan, particularly as a lot of changes happened with the Interviews and Research section. This was because we had both organised to go home and interview our own families and friends for this project. Though it has been extremely useful to visualise what we need to do and when we need to do it.

We had originally decided that we would go out into the streets of Leeds and interview strangers in the streets,  however we decided against this for a number of reasons, we felt that we wouldn't be able to get the audio quality that we needed as Leeds is usually very busy, so a lot of background noise, furthermore, because its so busy, we felt that people would not be willing to step aside to sign a consent for and then do an interview standing in the cold. And finally, we both felt that we would not necessarily be the most comfortable for us to interview strangers, and though it sounds a little pathetic, neither of us have had any experience with doing professional interviews, so we felt that our first project that uses interviews would likely be much more successful if we are as comfortable as possible, and then move on to strangers from there.

Despite mostly interviewing our own family, we decided that we would use consent forms as we wanted to treat the whole project as professionally as possible, after altering an already existing one by Sara, i had a consent for ready to go. I also made a parental consent form by changing all the "I"s to "My Child"s.

From here i will go on to do a test interview.

Applied Animation 1: Getting Started

After getting into our groups, of which my group consists of me and Greta, we determined what we would like to do for this project. We knew that we wanted to do something related to family, however we couldn't decide on what to specifically focus on, though we knew very quickly we wanted it to be interview based, similar to Creature Comforts format, only 2D instead of Stop Motion. We created Spider Diagrams for potential ideas which is shown below. 

Greta's original suggestion was doing a short documentary around euthanasia, but we decided that not only do we want to work on something more positive, but both of us are more comedy orientated and would produce better work if it was going to be an animation with humour. Similarly I had wanted to do something relating to war stories, however not only would this also be considerably upsetting, but we didn't have a huge amount of contacts we could go to for interviews on this topic.

We eventually decided after the weekend to think about it, do focus more on food and family tradition that comes with it. This was because we felt it would be something everyone could relate to, furthermore after considering that not everyone we interview would likely have something to say about our previous topics, everyone does eat, so everyone will have some standpoint on food.

After this we began work on a timetable for this project, and a series of interview questions we could ask.

Responsive: Collaborative Practice 2: The Battle Plan

This last Friday we had another responsive meeting, and it was a lot more successful than the last. After discussing the ideas we had developed from the last session we felt a lot more confident about the ideas we had, however after having a few drinks we came up with the winner of an idea that we all seemed happy to do, which would be to create a funny info-graphic animation, similar to that of the Aperture Science clips for Portal 2.

we also worked out how much work needed to be done and who would do each section, I visualised this with a weekly plan. We knew that me and oscar would most likely take a leading roll for most of the moving parts, and ensuring that designs are ok for animation, however Hattie and Tom are taking the leading roll with character/environment design with a little bit of input from us to ensure that it works well in the animation.

The main thing we need to focus on is the script, as that will be where most of the comedy comes through.