COP Practical: Teddybear Idea Development

Continuing on with my teddy bear animation idea, I started doing research into teddybears, in general and in popular culture.

I felt like this as a subject I did not need to research particularly far. The reason for this is because, I like many people are very familiar with teddybears, particularly the famous ones like Winnie the Pooh. And it's not particularly hard to figure out why these teddybears are so popular.

 

From the research I collected I started drawing teddybears with a variety of different techniques and mediums. While I thought portraying my characters as teddybears was a good idea, I knew they had been done many times before so needed my own spin on it.

Unfortunately this idea in it's entirety came to an end before pre-production had ended. When I received feedback I was met with very reasonable criticism. The most notable criticism I received, that in the end led to me abandoning the project was that actually creating my own live-action scene would take a lot of work and time I simply don't have. Instead of creating my own reference material, why not use something that already exists and apply the same technique of animating it shot-for-shot. While initially this was hard to hear as I was at the time quite enthusiastic about the idea, I did agree practically immediately and decided to go back to the drawing board.  

Initial Ideas for a COP3 Practical

I wanted to create a practical so an animation that demonstrates how animation evokes emotion. So to put it simply I liked the idea of creating an animation that has the ability to make the viewer cry. I felt like this wasn't too much of a daunting task, I had created work in the past that has been viewed as emotional and it is a subject I feel like I am interested in and can tackle more easily than comedy for example. I have long believed that the ability to make someone cry in film is far easier than to make someone laugh, to do that for me would require a lot more planning and a great amount of thought. I can come up with a tearjerking scene I feel fairly easily.

Although I liked this idea, it felt pretty vague and from the beginning, I knew whatever I would create for my practical needed to tie in to my essay and I have known for a long time that one of my weaknesses is that of not staying on subject and straying off target.

Oscar gave me the idea to instead of just animating a scene and that be it, have two scenes as my final products. One that is animated and one that is shot for shot, a live action version of that scene. I really liked this idea and felt like it would give me the opportunity to put to the test how animation can evoke emotion in ways that are not necessarily better than live-action, but different.

The first idea I had was thought up one night at around 4am and scribbled into a sketchbook...

It wasn't a particularly unique idea 'a house party is happening and a character is stood outside alone in the cold and just as he begins to walk off, someone from inside sees him and invites him in', but I felt like it was enough to evoke emotion, in fact I think that sometimes the simpler ideas are more successful at evoking emotion. But I felt like it wasn't enough just to animate this scene shot for shot, that is essentially rotoscoping and I'm not really using animation to it's advantage. So the next follow up idea I had was pretty simple, in the animated version, turn them all into teddybears. Teddybears have long been used in animation and children's book illustrations to evoke emotion. And how do they evoke emotion? Simple, their cute, fluffy, soft and we hate the idea of them having a hard time (part of the reason why Toy Story is so successful at evoking emotion in it's viewers).

A New Beginning

My question that my research will attempt to answer is How does animation evoke emotion? For my practical I feel like I need to basically show how animation evokes emotion, but how I go about it is the challenge I am facing at the moment.

A key obstacle I am trying to overcome at the moment is that emotion is such a broad thing it is hard to narrow it down enough to put it to the test. For example at the very start of this project I was not sure of what emotion in particular I wanted to portray, but felt that I needed to just portray one emotion such as laughter or sadness because I have a very limited amount of time to put my skills to the test.

Project Proposal

Creative Response: Development

So once I had the interviews filmed I put together the footage on Premiere and put footage of each animated character from each animation over the top. Unfortunately I found it quite difficult to find enough footage to use over the top son I resulted to keeping in some footage of the recorded interviews. This was not originally intended although in the end I feel it did make the documentary more professional and entertaining.

I was happy with how the Creative Response turned out. The nice thing about doing the interviews was that I did not anticipate how much each interview would have to say on the subject. Each interviewee seemed genuinely passionate about the subject and passionate about expressing their views, so the Creative Response ended up being far longer than I had originally intended.

Censorship and Truth Lecture

This lecture was about how imagery we see and media we see has been altered in certain ways to change the way we think. Whether that's changing the ways we think politically or socially, it is a very deliberate act that has had a lot of thought and attention put into it to change our perceptions, so basically throughout history we have been lied to by politicians and even now in the present day with airbrushed photography in the magazines we buy daily. It is this lack of truth that makes it hard to trust anything we are shown on TV or presented with. We are lied to on a large scale with altered political photos, such as Trotsky being removed from photos that also feature Stalin, but also on a far smaller scale in the media with celebrities in gossip magazines.

Furthermore, after knowing this information about how our points of views are manipulated, should we be protected by it? This can be applied to animation because as animators we have a responsibility to be truthful, that does not necessarily mean that everything we make needs to be factual, but if we are making animation that is factual we need to make sure we are responsible for what we are making and if it is suitable for the target audience. For example if we are making content for a particularly young audience we need to make sure we take responsibility for in many ways shaping their views of the real world so in that sense we need to remain truthful.

The Flipped Classroom Lecture

I found this lecture to be pretty fascinating if at times slightly confusing as it dealt with quite complicated subject matter. But what I took from the lecture is how art is used in the real world often to further a cause. For example in the 2008 US Presidential Campaign the Obama Hope poster was created by Shepard Fairey to inspire and motivate people to vote for Barack Obama. Art has been used in the past for social issues and has proved to be an integral part of huge movements. We looked at art in the form of posters from throughout history that have served the purpose of furthering a cause, whether it's anti government or for a protest.

"The posters produced by the ATELIER POULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories." - Statement by the Atelier Populaire.

What is being said in the above statement is that if a message that is presented through a poster is everywhere in society then it is more likely to get noticed and inspire people to follow a cause which is the point of the poster.

This lecture could influence the way we work as animators because like in posters animations can deliver important messages that could help motivate people. For example this has been done in the past where during the Second World War, Disney produced Donald Duck cartoons that were incredibly anti nazi and inspired people to feel the same way.

Creative Response: Research

Once I had the idea for my Creative Response, I went around my class and asked various students if they knew any animated characters who have a mental illness. I found out through asking people that there were actually few characters who have mental illnesses in animation, and if they do it is not an integral part of the narrative and often goes unnoticed to the viewer.

Luckily I found enough people to interview who had enough to talk about with each of their chosen characters. What surprised me in a good way when conducting my research was that each of the characters I discovered through other people had traits of mental illness and yet they seemed to be effected in entirely different ways.

For example I spoke to Oscar and he discussed to me the character of Korra from Legend of Korra, one of his favourite animated TV shows and talked about how she had suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in series three of the show. But then alternatively Guy and Jemma spoke to me about the character of L from the Anime TV series Deathnote who suffers from a mental illness but in an entirely different way where he has social anxiety and terrible social skills yet is incredibly intelligent.

It also became intriguing when conducting the interviews how sometimes mental health is part of an animation without it actually ever actually being mentioned. When discussing Cowboy Bebop with Olly we discussed how mental health effects all four of the main protagonists yet is never really mentioned. We disagreed on the character of Spike. I feel that the character is throughout the series in a state of constant lethargy (I also felt this after researching more in-depth into the character) and that due to his lack of desires and aspirations and fearlessness of death this makes him a negative representation of mental health, not a poor representation of mental health but definitely not inspiring. Whereas Olly disagreed with me on this and felt that Spike's attitude towards life is actually very positive and he feels that his relaxedness is inspiring and teaches the viewer to not worry about every little thing and to take what life throws at you and just go with the flow.

I found the research part of the Creative Response to be by far the most interesting part because I found it fascinating to get different peoples opinions, even if I might have disagreed with them at times.

Creative Response: Final Idea Concept

So for the second idea for my Creative Response of which I felt was a lot more realistic in terms of what I could create in the time I had was to create a short documentary. The documentary would be comprised of interviews with fellow animation students talking about characters they know in animation who have mental illnesses and talking about how well they think they are represented to an audience. Then over the top of the audio of these images the visuals would be made up of footage of these chosen characters from whatever animation they appear in.

The idea for this documentary was inspired by the documentary Room 237 which is a documentary made up of people discussing their theories about the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining. I feel the documentary maker of this film decided not to show the interviewees on screen due to it being a stylistic choice, a style similar to another documentary I enjoyed Amy about the life of the musician Amy Winehouse. So when it came to making my documentary I was aiming to do the same thing.

Creative Response: Abandoned Original Concept Idea

So I had some difficulty initially figuring out what idea I wanted to go with for my Context of Practice Creative Response. Originally I had the idea to create an animation that centered on two different generations. It needed to relate to my choosing essay question which was How successfully is mental health represent in animation to children? So to go about this I was going to animate a scene where a child is seen sat in front of the television watching The Lion King.

An innocent site, the parent is someone who works in social services with people with mental health problems and at the end of a working day has know problem letting the child watch their favourite movies which happen to be Disney films over and over again. But what they do not realise is that the child is actually getting a negative portrayal of mental illness through this because the hyena characters in the film have traits that are associated with mental illness. But they are represented in a negative way as they are viewed as the antagonists of the film and are segregated from society. So this child watching this film starts to get the view that this is the 'correct' way to react to people with mental health problems which could lead to this child growing up having a negative view of people with mental health problems.

But then twenty years later I had the idea that the daughter or son of the child who watched The Lion King twenty years ago could be watching a recent Disney film such as Pixar's Inside Out and instead of developing a negative perception of mental illness, develops a far more understanding perception due to the way this film for example tackles the subject matter in a different way.

Unfortunately due to time constraints I had to abandon this idea as I simply would not have enough time to tell this story in the time I had and for this particular idea I feel it would have only worked if it had been made as an animation.