Documentary Animation// Briefing, Project Group and Idea Generation

Today my class and I were briefed on our first project of 2016 titled 'Documentary Animation'. This briefing defined that our class separate into small groups of two or three and animate a documentary related to one of the following categories; Sports, Mental Health, Family and The Environment.

To make the process of choosing groups easier, we wrote our names under the category we were interested in working within and then discussed with each other about our desired roles and rough ideas for the project. I knew I wanted to make something full of heart and emotion, I also knew I wanted to work as an animator in 2D and that I wanted to possibly work on concept. Moving around the class and hearing each fellow students ideas I began to get a basic idea of my own about who I wanted to group up with. I settled into a group with James Beardsell and Malachi Lawrence; drawn to the group by James honestly about wanting to make a project surrounding his own experience of growing up without his father.

Our idea for the animated documentary surrounds a very rawly personal interview with James about his memories of his father who passed away when he was a child, including his feelings about the subject. As far as thinking up ideas for the animation itself we mentioned the style of 'Draw My Life' which is a youtube video trend where bloggers take a time-lapse of them drawing on a white board, which illustrates their life; however we felt like this didn't really feel like animation but rather a time lapse. We thought about doing a rotoscope animation with the background being far more detailed and complex then the 'animated' features itself, which would be animated using James as a reference when speaking. However we agreed that mix media with this project would be perfect, because mix media isn't nesseserally a visual technique that live action can achieve there for as animators we should take full advantage of the artist field we work within and use it to our advantage heavily. I thought it would be a wonderful idea to mix between live action footage, rotoscoping and 2D animation with contrasting composited textures and memoribilia that James still has used as a sort of environment or elements of focus.

We also outlined our roles within the group project, for myself I was given the roles of Visual script writer, Colour design, Environment design and Animator.