Applied Animation - Animated Documentary - Weekly Production diary - Week One

This week an idea for this animated documentary was formed under the theme of SCIENCE, The idea aims to look at stereotypes and how people perceive oneself under certain circumstances, this could be the environment, personal bias. The practical aspect of the idea involves gathering primary research via going out into the public and gathering portraits from members of the public, whilst simultaneously asking them questions of what they think of our personalities based on just our physical appearance.
From this we aim to use the portraits to produce a morphing animation of each others faces. Once the research has been conducted we shall make an audio commentary on what we discovered about the public's preconceptions about the type of persons we may be just from our appearance - this will then be animated to with a character of our own design.

FIRST CONTACT -

On Thursday of this week I was at a fundraiser event at the Brudenell Social Club of which I had contributed to by selling one of my own designs as a T-shirt. I also had with me my A6 sketchbook and so felt like this would be a good opportunity to begin with some primary research. The demographic was largely made up of students and young people - this was due to the fundraising event being put on by the Leeds Student Radio.
With the atmosphere being relaxed it was easy to find people willing to contribute to the project, when i approached people i first said that the portrait was to be part of an animated documentary and I was unsure whether or not this had any effect on how the people participating perceived us.
What did have an affect on how people perceived us or how they said they perceived us was that i noticed if the person who was getting there portrait drawn was stood further away and could not see the reaction until later - the participants were more honest about their preconceptions of the person they were drawing. This may be a problem that we have to overcome by different 'interview' tactics, e.g asking the participant to draw one of us from a far whilst they think they are not looking.

Overall I think that this first taste of primary research has left me feeling positive about future work on this project, I may also try to bring my sketch book and a pen with me to places that are busy yet have a slightly different demographic.