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).