Final Outcome of A Walk Through the Green

All in all, I feel as if this project had the worst outcome. As I wasn't too comfortable working in After Effects and left it too late to actually animate it differently what I had done wasn't anywhere near enough.
Feedback from different people was very helpful and yet still polite. I feel like, from what they were saying, maybe keeping with the original characters may have been best or simply not using after effects at all would've been better. A challenge to make plain shapes move like real people was enough. With a project like this, I feel that my time management skills weren't as good as they should have been. Especially when it came down to dealing with a software I wasn't used to, during the last few days.
The end result may have been better with sound to at least show my aims of what I wanted to convey through the area and not simply the story of the characters.

Starting to Animate Background Images and Storyboards

For my storyboards I decided to pick a handful of my favourite characters that I took an interest in at the green and combine them in to a story that was similar to my own. It consisted of the dog walking woman coming out of her house and going from the loud city to the calm empty green space. Behind her is a smart looking man in shades, a coat and cap and he walks past her as her dog takes an interest in a group of kids having their lunch. She tugs on the lead to keep on walking the other way and the dog soon follows before they get to a tree just beside the man on the bench. As the dog goes to pee on the tree, the woman stands there and looks around in confusion, wondering how this noise of a crying baby has been following her since she left her house. That is when the man opens up his coat and rocks a little baby back and forth for it to slowly go to sleep. In surprise, the woman with the dog squeals thus waking up the baby and the father also joins in the cries of his baby due to having to get it back to sleep again. The woman rushes out of the green, in embarrassment, with her dog and that is the end of it.

I was thinking that I could create a hand drawn background from the photos I took and then go from one side to the other with the character walking across through the story. I had in mind to do either acetate on top of the background or cut out bits of paper however, after I had shared my ideas, I was advised to perhaps simplify the characters down to shapes.

At first I thought this would be a good idea due to shapes being easier to animate and not having to hand draw it was a relief but when I went on to after effects to try and animate the shapes I didn't feel so sure of what I was doing or comfortable enough with using the software. It was my own fault that I left the animating so late, without help from tutors and most of the time I spent on it was trying to figure out how to make the video actually do what I want to do.

Chosen Places

For this part of the project we were blindfolded and told to point at a random part on a map of London. This place, on the map, would be where we're headed off to to study the area and record features of it's atmosphere and the people in it. My place was in Bermondsey, by the very corner of a crossroads. On y way there I stopped off to buy food and by the time I got there, I was tired from walking so much that it was a relief to find that my place was a little green area with benches and pathways. The sign on the fence by the green's entrance said St Mary Magdalen's Graveyard but when I walked in and sat down on a bench with my lunch, I looked around and there were only a few tombstones and basically no graves in sight.
What I did like was that the place wasn't cluttered with gravestones. It was clear of too much going, the complete opposite of the busy city outside the fence.

I realised that I had no sketchbook pages left so I went on a long trek across London to find the nearest stationary shop. Believe it or not I had to take a few trains to find one. It was extremely tiring and all I wanted to do was get back to that bench, away from all the loud bustling activities of the city. On my way back I decided the best thing to do would be to record the contrast in sound from the inner city to inside that bubble of peace. I decided to take pictures of the area as well as sketching the passers by. The few characters I took interest in was a young quite shaggy haired, bearded man and his dog playing very actively around the tombstones and benches, a man on his phone in deep conversation, a mother and her daughter walking by (the mother on the phone and her daughter eating a bag of chips), a couple walking beside a woman walking her dog but who turned out to be on her own as I later saw her without them. Later on I came across a young man with a group of primary school or perhaps very young high school kids. He looked very busy, handing them food from a Greggs bag and their school bags and hockey sticks seemed to hint to them coming from or going off to a hockey club with the young man as their coach.

A bundle of other people went through the green and it was hard to keep up with all of them but I think y favourite character was seemed to be a very smartly dressed, cut off and uptight young man with a cap and shades on,walking by the old house. As he turned around, however, you could see this little baby between the folds of his coat. It was a lovely sight to see quite a soft side to this strict looking man.

After I took a few more photos, I grabbed the bus back to the station before taking the train back to college. It was a very interesting day and I found that the time to sit and think and take in a certain place was great in creating a story for different characters. I wish that I perhaps looked in to the area itself more than the people though. Perhaps by walking around a bit more and looking at the tombstones.

Introduction to You Are Here Project

For this project, we were split in to a group of animators and told that we will be looking in to the different atmospheres of city life. We were shown a collection of different animated short films that showed this and also this gave us an idea of what we should try and look for and notice in the city.
Being in London, it was only fitting that we went looking around the city we were in and try to get in that practice of recording our surroundings. We walked along a path up by the River Thames and through paths in and out around blocks of flats and a few abandoned buildings before coming to the Cutty Sark where we could have our lunch and look around a busier town.

On the way, me and Qandeel got left behind as most of our ways to record our surroundings was stopping and drawing rather than photography. I found what was good about that was looking at the ways some places could be used whether it was in films we had seen or similarities to other existing places. For a while we took an interest in a side of the river with a butternut squash, tire, rope, old blanket and driftwood in the sand which we discussed perhaps we could just live there and make a fire and create an amusement park out of the tire swing. It was those little moments I found quite fun from coming across new places in a city you've lived all your life in.

I felt that perhaps I could've stopped more, and not cared about keeping up with the group, as there were still a load of things I wanted to stop and draw. I should have also brought my camera to take more photos than the ones on my phone, which died from a low battery.

Final Outcome of the Guilty Squirrel and Feedback

I didn't finish it to the end scene where we see the fox carrying away the dead squirrel but it isn't something that won't take too long to get done in my free time as well as adding sound of rain, squirrels and a fox call.

The feedback I got from this project was very positive in reference to the outcome. I was advised to perhaps add some interesting sounds of the characters to exaggerate their emotions more as well as the background sounds of rain and thunder. The concept of my story I felt was explained and presented well through the animation and this got some positive attention too.

I feel like getting it done on time may have made this project outcome perfect but all in all, I am very happy with what I've produced.

Starting Animation, Background and Storyboards

Finally, I came to piece together a short, quite metaphorical, story about two squirrels' ways of trying to save another squirrel being chased by a fox. One squirrel is on a high branch with a bundle of acorns it has saved over time. They're throwing them down at the fox in hopes that it will give up and run off, leaving it's wounded prey alone. The main squirrel doesn't have any acorns but tries to grab one from another high branch. It tries not as much as it could have and makes a small mistake in doing so. This makes them feel useless and so they run back in to their hole in the warm tree with their sleeping family. Comforting and away from the outside world. Of course, the squirrel above runs out of acorns and without any help from anybody else they aren't able to save the squirrel from the fox.

I planned this story very specifically due to the messages of what I wanted to present. The acorns represent wealth and money and the tree represents the class ladder. The squirrel with more acorns and is higher up on the tree, away from the bottom shows someone who has the money to give to the sorting out of the issue which they are far away from experiencing. The hole in the tree summarises the comfort of privilege but also it is this that keeps us away from the cold reality outside. The one acorn that the guilty squirrel goes after is the little bit of money they have to work for and in some cases they can't use this or get a hold of it. By crawling out of the hole, the squirrel is not used to it and though squirrels can climb trees, the squirrel's mistake of slipping on the bark and almost falling down is enough to make this rather timid, shy and not very confident person give up in the idea they have already screwed up. Every little helps but surely the person with all the money has more power and ability than the squirrel who hides away back in the comfort of the lucky environment they have. By the time this squirrel's energy and nuts run out, the fox has already caught it's prey. I decided to make all the characters, except the fox, squirrels to show that they are, like humans, the same species and also they're on the same side. The fox is a very different creature not alien enough for them to not be unknown but also not familiar enough for them to be used to it.

I felt like the aim was to make sure although we see the guilty squirrel is upset and almost able to feel sorry for, the real victim is at the bottom of the tree. This is going through the mind of the guilty squirrel. It is not only that they feel bad for not doing enough but also bad that they take the time to feel sad about themselves rather than the person they should have saved.

I created a bundle of different storyboards and worked on backgrounds of inside, outside, the bottom and branches of the tree. I looked up images of squirrels and foxes to create simple character designs with the main animal features and got everything ready for animating on flash.

Most of the project was spent on using flash and animating the story. This went smoothly without any problems and I learnt how to get more comfortable with using the software which I lacked to do so in areas of the last project, so I feel like I achieved quite a lot.

I feel like this part of the project went at a nice pace. I thought about the ideas of the story enough to create something truly meaningful and yet was able to not make it too complex in what was being shown in the story. I feel as if perhaps the hole in the tree could have been closer to the squirrel on the ground and the fox. Although it's a small feature, it may have stuck closer to the message of the story in showing that the guilty squirrel is in the very middle of the tree, neither too far or close to the problem.

Development of Ideas and the Truth of the Story

I felt like, perhaps I went in to my ideas more in depth without looking at why the subject area I wanted to go in was important and making this real issue real to me. Because of course it is unfortunate for people experiencing oppression but I as the creator needed a true perspective coming from myself.

A group critique of ideas so far helped me to realise maybe the subject I wanted to go in was taken from a perspective I was sympathising with rather than empathising with. Instead of the usual feeling sorry for the main characters I was choosing to focus on the issue was really more personal than I expected.
It was the feeling of guilt from me being privileged within the feminist group I was part of. Because of this, my time was spent dealing with the guilt of trying to feel and think like a moral person but no do what a oral person might do. Of course it was debatable from what some people think to what we could do to really help those that we keep talking about as being in a terrible place at the time but again it was all talk and not as much action.

I decided to look in to ideas of why I, and perhaps many other privileged  people, have such a tough time in getting out and doing something. The first few ideas which I found was the idea that many privileged people are born in to a comforting environment thus not giving them the strong backbone to go out and experience the varying life styles of other people. Whilst an upper middle class person could pay some money for different charities a month a lower middle class person may need their money for themselves. To pay for necessities to live and a few luxuries to live life happily in a world which revolves mainly around money.
My mum was raised in a Methodist, left wing family who buy us a goat for a family in Africa every Christmas, prioritise fair trade products, only buy fruits grown in season and don't allow the Daily Mail inside the house. I asked her about how there's a promotion of being moral more than there actually is the act of being moral and she explained how this was why many people with depression tend to be of a privileged background. There's the question of is someone who has no knowledge and no bother to find out about what's wrong in the world more moral than the person who knows but doesn't push themselves to try and sort those out. Then there's the question of do we really have the power to do that?

Bit by bit, this subject of the project was becoming more and more interesting and eye opening for me in finding out about myself as well as creating an issue I had not really seen in a story before. I feel like I could have asked more people about these questions, perhaps within the movement I followed. At the moment most of the questions I kept asking myself were being directed at me more than similar people. Again probably due to this idea of guilt and self criticism which is something I've become quite used to.

Intro to Project and Ideas on Freedom

For this project, we were looking in to ideas revolving around freedom and liberty.
We watched a documentary about a couple of nudist hikers who went on a long walk through Britain and came across different people with different opinions on what they were doing. The ideas generated from it were mostly questions of 'are we, the privileged, really free?' and 'how has society been able to make us feel so discomforted by something so natural?'

At first I was thinking of going in to an area of freedom such as nudism or gender or even the way we dress but then I thought of going in to something I personally have had an interest for for a while now. I wanted to look in to the people being oppressed within their own areas of belief. In the civil rights movement, where most of the black men were seen as the leaders, the black women still were treated as the supporting wives and mothers. In Islam where the Hajj consists of Muslim people on a pilgrimage to Mecca, coming together in peace and yet women were still seperate in this idea of equality. Most of these issues kept coming back to women and yet I could see that even in the feminist movement most of the cheesy 'girl power' speeches that the mainstream media prioritised was coming from privileged white women. Whether this was because they were more appealing after years of western society's favouritism or simply cos yet again they got there because of their privilege, it was still a hint to the oppression within the movement of poor, LGBTQUA women of colour.

I generated some ideas on this issue and had an idea of people of different beliefs and movements shouting at each other their views whilst the true people that needed the word of God/gender equality/peace between races were sitting on the side, no voice and no help to be heard.

I feel as if this day was a great way to get ideas flowing as it is a subject area I've been quite interested in for a while. I feel that maybe I could have had a wider range of ideas before going so in depth in to one. Maybe a project like this should have been based around some philosophical thinker's works and theories of society's 'freedom'.