Apply Brief - Research

When we were first given our Apply Brief, I was bewildered to say the least. Basically in the sense of having to do another good animation in less than a week. We were given 7 emotions to choose from; Happiness, Love, Hate, Fear, Longing, Lateness and Surprise. Again I found this topic to be rather broad, so I began brainstorming to see if I could evoke any nice ideas.

In fact, I actually found this session to be one which I couldn't stop with ideas! I had so many and I found that lots of the ideas overlapped emotions, but I guess that would be inevitable to whatever way you took the narrative. In the end after some feedback I was told to stop thinking of more and more ideas, but to pick three and make them solid ones, ones I could really animate.

The first one I chose was Surprise. My narrative for this was along the lines of a little boy getting glasses for the first time and being amazed at how clear the world is around him. I would like to go from blurred POV shots to really clear ones as the character puts the glasses on and off. I would also like to work on anticipation, and timing as he does this.

My second idea was to go with the happiness theme. One definition I found was 'good fortune', so I immediately thought 'fortune cookies!'. Therefore my storyline for this one if I chose it would to be have a family at a restaurant and they each receive fortune cookies, or focus on one character who doesn't initially want one, but then opens it and gets a good fortune.

Then the last solid idea I crafted was to do with Longing. I thought longing would be the hardest theme to come up with ideas for but I actually really like this one. I thought I would come up with a character who has moved abroad for a job, illustrating this by animating a world map and then annotating it through the continents to show the space difference from the protagonist to their family. Then the character gets homesick and yearns to be home again. 

I want my animation at this moment in time, to be hand drawn or digitally drawn, not a pixilation, purely for the reason being I want to really explore the principles of animation, and I find personally, this is much harder to do with pixilation, from experience. Therefore I think will be able to extensively plan my pose to pose animation and work on the timing in a more practical way.