Week 8- Animated Documentary

We had all agreed that using colours on the room design was too much because we were wanting to keep the background subtle, Dan had told me to try designing the background using brown tones as they create more depth. Im really happy with how this background looks as they are still warm colours, and they don't stand out too much, which is what we were wanting as we didn't want to take the focus off the characters. 

These where some of the chair designs that I had drew up for the second scene, which will be in the care home. We wanted quite square and harsh looking chairs in this scene in comparison to the first scene where the chair is quite round and looks comfy. We had all agreed on that the second chair is probably the best one as that is probably what they have in care homes. 

Week 7- Animated Documentary

This week I had made a start on drawing up the room designs for the backgrounds for out animation. I had started off by drawing up a simple line drawing of the room and then added colour, the first design I tried to use warm tone colours for the room but after talking to both dan and Guy we all agreed that it probably wont work with the style of the animation that we are wanting. 

I had then changed the windows in the room because the first design didn't really look right, I had also tried to use water colours for the next two designs as we wanted the colours quite subtle. 

For this design I had worked from the scene in the animatic as the perspective in the other designs wasn't quite right. Working from the animatic made it easier for me as all I had to do was try and test the colour on this design. 

Week 6- Animated Documentary

This week I decided to get a start on designing what the room would look like, in which our animation is taking place. I tried designing and planning the room layouts based on what I had read from the script that Dan had made for us to use.

These were just some really simple room layouts that I had come up with for our animation, at first I was thinking that the room would have a lot of stuff in it as elderly peoples houses are usually cluttered and have a lot of stuff, but then the feedback from Dan and Guy was that they think that the room should be really simple as we don't want to take any attention off the characters. I was happy with that feedback as it made me think that it was right and we should keep it really simple because our main focus is the characters and we don't want to create something that will distract the viewers from them. We had also agreed on having a bay window instead of a normal window, as that is also a main thing in our animation as the grandmother will be sat next to the window looking out of it. 

I had then started looking in to the chairs that elderly people have and trying to figure out which one would be best suited for the grandmother, so I then started sketching up some of the chairs that I had looked in to. Guy and Dan had then both agreed that the chair on the bottom left was the best for out animation. my next step was to look up winged back chairs with queen Anne legs. 

I had created a moodboard of Wingback chairs with queen Anne legs, as this would help me with different perspectives of the chair and also different designs. I really liked the top left chair, and decided that it would look quite good if the chair in our animation was slightly pink but looked more worn, this is because when I asked for feed back off Dan and Guy they had both said that the chair needs to look more worn than it actually does, but personally I think that the chair should look worn but not too much it that it looks dirty and I also think that if we have this really worn down chair in the scene it wouldn't look right and fit in with everything else. 

Week 5- Animated Documentary

This week we had started off by discussing what all of our next tasks are for pre production. My jobs are now, set design and layout. Dan had given each of us A short story of our animation, this was extremely helpful as he had described how the room will look, the chair that the grandmother was sat on and the outside in which the grandmother is slightly facing looking out of the window.

This made things easier for me and Guy to work from, as Guy was creating the storyboards and me working on the backgrounds and how things would be designed within the room. We had both read it and we all agree that nothing would have to be changed as it pointed out all the valid points that we would need to work from and it tells the story of our animation beautifully. Dan had then wrote a screenplay based off the short story that he had wrote previously.

 

We then had to plan for our first crit of the brief, so we had to complete a presentation of all the work that we had completed so far and the work that we planned to do next, each presentation was 20 minutes long so we all agreed on that we would talk about the areas in which we was most involved in, so for me that would have been the research. 

These are all the slides from our presentation. We had started the presentation in order of which work we had started doing first, so I was talking about the documentaries that we had watched for research which was the Louis Theroux and the Isabella documentary, and the two films which we had also watched which was Wrinkles and Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. I also spoke about how I had emailed care homes to see if we could visit and the poster that I created to place around uni to see if people had any experience with Alzheimer's in their families. We had received really good feedback from everyone and they suggested that we don't create our animation using charcoal and that we use the water colours as they think it would work better with slight colour in our animation otherwise it would be much of a dark animation.  

Week 4- Animated Documentary

This week I was unable to attend two of the interviews that we had planned, as I was unwell but Dan and Guy had kept me updated with the response that we had received from the interviews. The next day we had all met up and tried to come up with some ideas  for a story based off all the recordings that had been gathered, but this didn't really go as planned as we were still struggling to come up with a strong idea that was simple but still really effective. 

Steve had suggested that we all watch a documentary called 'Isabella' by Ross Hogg. this documentary wasn't really clear as there was quite a lot of noise over the documentary, but we did get one idea that we all agreed on for our animation, which was that we all wanted to include the close ups of the elderly woman, like the elderly woman in the documentary 'Isabella'. We all thought that these would be a really strong scenes within our animation.                                       

https://vimeo.com/136430442

I also found a film on Netflix called 'Still Alice' this film was about a woman around the age of 50 who started to develop signs of Alzheimer's. Personally I thought that this film was really good especially because it showed both perspectives of the effects that Alzheimer's has on people and the people around them, It demonstrated the struggles that she was having with the early stages of Alzheimer's as she was a lecturer. Although I don't think that this film would of helped us with coming up with ideas for a storyline, I do still think it was relevant to watch for research.

Week 3- Animated Documentary

This week I had research into care homes that where close by and the three nearest care home were

-Burley house care home
-Headingley hall
-Anchor, Halcyon court care and nursing home

This is just some of the research that I had done looking into the care home that I had found, my next step was to try and get into contact with the care homes to see if it was possible to visit and talk to the nurses, relatives to the residents and with consent from the family possibly talking to the residents themselves. 

This is an email I had sent to the manager of Headingley Hall. But before sending this email I had rang up to see if it was possible to visit and they kindly gave me the managers email address, although the response back to our email isn't what we expected, they politely said that Headingley hall is not a registered dementia setting.  

We had then found another care home in Harrogate called Nesfield lodge, and we had sent the same email but changed the name and the care home so then it was suited for this care home, we had done this because we felt as if the email did not need to be changed because it informed the person, who we are, what we are doing and why we are doing an animation on this subject. but sadly they did not reply to my email. 

Because we were struggling to come up with a solid idea for our animation, we had spoke to Mike and Steve and they had pointed out that me and Dan should talk about our experiences with close relatives suffering from Alzheimers, which is something that we hadn't thought about, but instead of just telling each other about our experiences with Alzheimers we had booked out the recording studio and recorded ourselves talking, this would mean that we could go back to the recordings and take notes of valuable points that we thought would help us with coming up with ideas. 

After me and Dan had done our interviews we thought that it would be a good idea to reach out to other students who have experienced Alzheimers and hear their response towards it, I then created a poster to place all around the university, and Guy had created the illustration for the poster. 

These are just some images of our poster, that we placed around uni. 

After we had placed the posters around uni, quite a few people had emailed us asking us if they could be any help towards our work. we had also received an email from some willing to help us by giving us a song that they had wrote about a relative having Alzheimers. 

we had replied back to each of theses emails and they were happy to help us with our animation by answering some questions whilst in the the recording studio, we had also interviewed a friend of guys from illustration and she was happy to help us too. 

Week 2- Animated Documentary

         

   This week we developed our research further. Guy had created a mood board filled with images that we had all contributed of our grandparents, this was to give us an idea for character designs, and to help us with environments and clothing for the characters. We were mainly focused on gathering images of our grandparents because we wanted it to fit more for the subject of our animation which is Alzheimer's

 At the start of the week we had all met up in uni, to discuss and share all the research we had gathered in hope that it would bring inspiration to us for our animation ideas. we struggled to come up with a solid idea that would be interesting enough to use as a narrative, so we started sketching out some concepts but we all decided that they wouldn't work. 

above is just some of the concepts that I had sketched out for come up with some ideas for our animation. 

This week we had all met up at guys house, to watch two films which we all thought would be relevant towards our animation. The first film we had watched was the animated film Wrinkles. This film was amazing, as they demonstrated all the aspects of what its like to have Alzheimer's and what its like to witness someone suffer from Alzheimer's. and the second film that we had watched was Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, although this film has no relevance to Alzheimers it tells a story about what its like to loose your memory which was also very helpful to us.