Applied Animation - Animated Documentary - Weekly 5

Bar maid collecting glasses as punters chat

This week further progress was made and more primary research was conducted. We have made the decision on the medium of animation. We are going to film scenes to feature in the animation and rotoscope them, this I think feels relative to the experience of asking people to draw portraits of us as we aim to give a point of view perspective in a majority of the shots and try and emulate the experience of gathering the research for this documentary.

We have decided based on the quality of the research we have gathered that we should choose to focus our research/experiment to just pubs. This is because people are more approachable and sociable, more willing to engage in the experiment. And by limiting the research to the pub environment it will make it easier to produce an animation that has a well rounded aesthetic that encapsulates that environment - giving the documentary more bite/ substance to it.

We went to The Fenton, a local pub near university which has in it a consistent set of regulars and would make for a great place to gather further material to feature in the animation.

We decided to visit here to gather reference material and footage to experiment rotoscoping with.

Whilst sat in the pub we were coming up with ideas on how visually we might tell the story of this experiment that we conducting to produce this documentary. We realised that we will have to have shots that establish the setting and pull the viewer into the environment, things like pints being picked up and put down, people playing pool, glasses being collected pints being pulled etc.

The next step that needs to be taken is to write a rough screen play that we can followed and make gathering footage to rotoscope easy, it will help to also arrange the footage when it comes to editing the the footage into an order that best carries the story through and keeps the interest of the audience.

This week we have also decided to make the first of our reflections on the research that we have gathered. Me and Ollie made use of the sound booth to record ourselves being interviewed (but more so conversationally) by one of our peers. I felt it important that the tone of the interview be quite laid back as if we were in the pub having this conversation about the experiment we are conducting. With the recordings that we have amounted we plan to make some lip syncing experiments using characters that are representatives of ourselves in our own respective art styles.

The idea is that whenever both of our characters are on screen the two art styles representing our faces will contrast and give another layer of how we percieve ourselves - I think that this raises a question for the viewer being something like 'are you your art?'. I also think that when documentaries get people to question themselves or make people just feel the need to ask questions in general it raises the quality of the documentary to a much higher standard.

Juke box, iconic piece of reference material