Applied Animation: The Environment - Initial Ideas

After the briefing Katy and I sat down and began to write down the first ideas that came to mind when we thought of the environment and we focused our ideas around animals, as this was something that I expressed an interest in doing during the group session. One idea that stood out to me straight away was the idea of expressing the issue of humans playing god in terms of re-introducing animals into the environment that are either rare, endangered or completely gone from the UK. I also liked the idea of having a contrast and touching upon the issue of humans playing god in terms of removing animals that they found to be a nuisance. With these two main issues being at the forefront of our attention we began to wonder how we could use these to create a documentary, this required us to think about what we wanted our message to be and what exactly did we want to research and convey through our work.

I'd recently watched a country file episode in which they were reporting on the re-introduction of wild boar to the English countryside and I thought that it linked directly to our line of thinking so we explored this to start with and developed ideas from there. Katy and I began to think of other similar instances and conflicting instances and came up with a few other ideas including seal slaughtering in Ireland; re-introduction of mink to solve the weasel problem; red kites being poisoned for killing farmers animals, etc.

Initial Brainstorms

We also began to think about which animals would be affected by such environmental changes and decided to create a small list of animals to focus on for our project. This focus on animals got us thinking instantly about creature comforts and we decided that we wanted to take a similar approach with our work in the sense that we wanted our documentary to be an interview with the different animals with the script being made of the facts and information gathered from our research.

 Naturally we then started to think about what form of technique we wanted to use. Within the session we spoke about using mixed media in our animation, as this is a method that is used quite frequently in animated documentary and it is something that I really want to try, as I really liked the effect it had in some of the examples we went through. Keeping this in mind, Katy and I decided that we wanted to stick to 2D, as this is the technique that we both want to focus on rather than 3D, we also wanted to experiment more with traditional media, for me it was more because I felt that I have neglected the use of traditional media over the last few months and I'd really like to return to it, as I love hand drawn things and actually having to use materials such as paint and pencil to create work, as I feel that you can achieve so much in terms of texture, line work, etc that you can't necessarily create through digital means. However, we also wanted to keep the work load manageable, so we have decided that we will keep the animation basic and use digital outlines that are simple and easy to duplicate and focus on create intricate backgrounds with traditional media. We are also thinking of experimenting with texturing and rendering the animated characters with water-colours through the use of masks and compositing, which is something we will also have to research.

Media considerations

From here we spoke to Sara about our story and she pointed out that whilst we have a good base idea, we need to figure out what we are actually trying to say through our work, as at the moment it is a little hazy and all the over place. We were glad for the input and will sit down and finalise our ideas after we have dome some research into our issue. Overall, I'm really pleased to be working with Katy and I'm excited to see what work we will produce together and how this project will develop.