Animation Style Ideas

The first animation style I had in mind was to take advice from Tom Bancroft in his book 'Creating Characters with Personality'. This was not because I saw it as reliable. In fact quite the opposite. 

The above image basically summarises the whole book. The whole book explains and presents images of how to create male characters with personality and when it comes to designing women characters there's only one chapter dedicated to it and even then it's only for them to be conventionally attractive for the purpose of being the love interest in your story. I wanted to create quite a negative message around this 'perfect' woman character and intend to design her around this chapter.

The short animation 'This Actually Happens A Lot' by Tom Laww I liked the look of due to it's simple coloured backgrounds but with a use of detailed lines for walls and furniture. Cos to some extent I wanted to not clutter the background but still draw in some detail.

I liked the look of the short animation 'Suzy's Willy' by Xavier Sailliol and Loic Espuche. It's simple block colours for the shape of the bodies yet the detail of the faces was pleasantly simplistic and I think exaggerated features that I hope to also present.

The animated feature film 'Cats Don't Dance' I thought all in all was important in relation to my project as it is about the invisibility of animals in the film industry. The animals in this film walk and talk and live like any other person yet they are not taken as seriously as humans and therefore keep getting the roles as extras if anything. I felt that it related to the invisible women that are pushed away from the roles of the 90210 cast and even in films, such as the Avengers and Frozen, that feature an empowering, strong, independent female role are still conventionally attractive. It's almost an insulting idea that her appearance not being a problem would be a bit too much for the public to handle. 

In one of the scenes in 'Cats Don't Dance' the popular human actress, Darla Dimple, sings about sabotaging the animals' performance to one of the big Hollywood directors. In this we see her as a giant towering over the main characters who she floods in a pink whirl pool and sends them down a waterfall. I like how it is all very feminine to show the evil side of her innocent little girly image and the water is used as a very oppressive and suffocating force. 

I'm hoping to use a similar idea of pretty and attractive visuals that force a negative and dangerous situation on the main characters.

I realised that not only did finding different animations really help to get an idea of what designs I could use but the expanded my ideas behind the story. Next time, I intend to develop these ideas in to more focused visuals from out of my head and on to paper.

Character and Story Ideas

From the interviews with friends and secondary research looking in to the invisible groups not valued for their unconventional beauty I decided to create some character designs around the different people. I'm not quite sure whether I want to stick with these designs or change them in order to try and portray the right messages but am determined to develop the ideas around them to help my decision. 

I finally came up with a storyboard. It is a first draft, so consist of more than I'll end up doing but again I will try to develop the characters' thus developing the story around them. 

As for the song, I have broken it down from 7 minutes to 3. This is mainly due to the length of the lyrics. In the end, I could just cut the lyrics out altogether and be able to shorten it further so there's not too much of a problem. 

I've done a few sketches around what the intro to the film can be. I plan on doing a short walk cycle of each character, displaying something they feel about themselves in their bodies, as well as transforming in to each other. I felt this transformation could show the diversity of the characters as well as how different they are, thus showing one of the mian messages of the story that there will never be just one natural body. One of the bad messages which areas of the body positive movement try to advertise is the idea of 'real women' and what a 'real' body looks like. Usually this points straight to a size 14/16 woman which may be seen as the average size but that doesn't mean it is the right nor is it the only truly healthy or beautiful size for everyone. 

Next week will be dedicated to finalising storyboards, character designs, backgrounds, colour palettes and animatics. So far, I have written up a few timetables to point me in the right direction and have collected together a few ideas from animations, artists, images and photography of what I want my work to hopefully follow. 

Personal Interviews

I decided to dive in a bit deeper with interviewing different women and their body shapes so asked friends and family if I could take photos of them and their body shape and also ask about how they felt in their bodies. (I felt it would be inappropriate to put them all here on the internet seeing as the subjects are wearing rather minimal clothing for me to get ideas of their bodies for character designs. Therefore they'll be staying in my sketchbook).

 Most of them admitted to feeling unhealthy, saw that being in a relationship could be helpful for confidence in their bodies and all of them admitted to having something they hated about their body. 

I liked that this part of my project allowed me to understand what someone feels about their body, face to face, hearing from them just between the two of us. Because of this, most of the answers were quite different from one another because of their personal meanings behind them. 

Although I felt I had asked them the right questions, I feel like I could have asked them in a way which would not get such closed answers in return. Maybe I could have let them elaborate more. Next time, I'll keep this in mind. I feel like the group interview was better as it went on more and let out more personal issues to learn about. 

Group Interview and Impact on Idea Development

For primary research, I decided to get together with a group of friends and discuss a few of the ideas around how important appearance is in relationships as well as it's impact on women. 

What I found from one of my friends was that even in the LGBT community, it was kind of normal for types of lesbians or gay men to go for a certain type. Whether it was a butch woman going for a feminine woman or, like her, a small woman going for someone a bit bigger. But she also explained that at some times, women wouldn't see her as their type because she was darker coloured that didn't really fit the 'Shane' look (Shane being a quite androgynous looking white, woman character on the L word). So even in an environment of women, who understand the pressure of fitting in to a kind of appearance, that look for an attractive 'type' is still present. She admitted to going through a time of trying to put on weight to be a look she found beautiful. This being done in a rather unhealthy way. As well as that, she also talked about using scar bleaching creams to lighten up the darker areas of her skin and through all this changing of how she looked, she talked about how she hadn't actually sat down with herself and asked 'if by finally turning in to what she wants to look like, will she really finally be happy with herself?'. 

I then went on to talk about what happiness with our bodies was. Acceptance? Adoration from who we're attracted to? Health? Being a type of beauty we adore? For me, I admitted I was partly following the advice of my mother, who mainly saw her body type in me and therefore was worried about my health. This concern wasn't taken out as well as it could have been and it annoyed me that even though I had had friends who went through eating disorders she wasn't very careful with what influence she had on my own body image. As well as this, although I have days where I look in the mirror and am happy with what I see, I never feel entirely complete if there isn't proof of wanted, positive male attention to how I look too. This I find the most scary, seeing as most of my feminist morals revolve around trying not to do anything based around a gender role, for anyone especially if it is for men but it's a thought which is always there, at the back of my mind.

Another friend of mine mentioned how she thinks about changing herself to fit in to her parents' approval. There had been a time where her mother literally called her 'a slut' for going out wearing make up, a gothic, strappy top and shorts as part of a Halloween costume. This wasn't surprising to me, seeing as I knew from other stories she had told me, that her parents were rather conservative and she had been keeping a lot of secrets from them, in reference to how her appearance has changed so much in an alternative direction. 

This talk brought to mind a lot of other ideas to the issues around body image and in conclusion we all realised, and my first friend pointed out, that 'if you actually sat down with yourself and didn't think about anyone regardless of society, going out and media, you actually wouldn't care at all how you look.'

Creative Week Ideas Finishing Product and Crit

The soundtrack that we wanted to use for our own amusement is copyrighted material but it hasn't stopped us from sharing it with our friends. All in all, this project started off as quite worrying due to the people in our groups being in college on different days from each other, therefore we weren't sure on what work needed to be done and to do together. In the end, we got what we wanted all finished and ready by our deadline at the end of the week. I've learnt that we worked better together and by working in a good group of people we were happy being with, we were able to generate a lot more ideas and get more done. 

Creative Week Developing Ideas

For 'Creative Week', the Media Production and Lens Based pathways paired up with the Graphics pathway and worked together in groups to create something solid and more physical than the usual .jpeg or .mp4 file we were all quite used to producing for our projects. 

Me, Qandeel, Siobhan and Nura decided that the best way to make the creation of this week fit in to all our FMPs was to take all our main focuses and apply them to what we were doing. We had a box of different materials to share and create the solid product from. The two empty plastic bottles made us think that we could probably make little figures of some sort of animal from them. Due to my theme of my FMP revolving a lot around the idea of beauty, what came to mind was a peacock. A very beautiful bird that was quite possible to turn these bottles in to. 

From this starting point, it made me think of how the female peacocks were more pigeon like and grey, than the wonderful coat of feathers that cover the beautiful male peacock. Nura's theme for her FMP revolved around the idea of transformation. Qandeel's looked in to mental illnesses and we thought of an interesting and quite worrying way that a female peacock transforms herself due to the influence of the male peacock. From this we did a storyboard about a female peacock coming across a male peacock. At first it seems as if she is falling in love with him and his beauty but then we later see that she is only after his glorious coat of feathers. She beats him up, rips them off him and walks off, wearing them as her own. 

From this story idea, we went to work on designing our two characters. The female peacock we kept quite plain and simple. Her being the main character, we wanted to make sure she could be the most expressive so we stuck two paper-clips over her button eyes so to resemble eyebrows that could frown in anger and raise in surprise. Her tale, we folded like a fan out of a Wasabi napkin whereas the male tale, I folded out of a piece of paper that I decorated with a peacock feather pattern. We made their beaks out of blue tack and a crown like featherey head for the male, out of blue tack and paper clips. We also decided to just stick a pretty silver broach on the side of the male's head just to add a bit more pizazz. 

With our peacock figures, we were ready to make a stop motion and from some of the stills we were excited to also put together a comic strip which would fit in to Siobhan's theme for her FMP.

I feel like we put together a great idea with the amount of time we had that day. Next time, however, I would like to try and find a way that we could get to work sooner and maybe all put together some more finished storyboards, just so that we knew exactly what we were doing.

Development of Ideas and Continuing Secondary Research

As I looked more in to the research I was finding, a lot of it pointed out to a group of people who were being affected most. It made sense seeing as I knew for sure they were the group most concerned with being in a relationship as well as prioritising their visual attractiveness to make sure this happened and this wasn't due to some vain, closed minded idea they had come up with themselves. It was due to pressure from an unfortunate gender role. As a woman, I feel like changing the project's direction is highly necessary for me to create a good outcome. Me never being in a relationship has usually, although I know isn't right, had me questioning my visual appearance more than the fact I am really just a shy person. Having to deal with four of my friends fall in to eating disorders also got me to a point of really just questioning why? 

In my research I found a few main sources which showed how women were more impacted by this idea that being attractive is something seen as worth obsessing over. 

First was an article from the Telegraph, stating that a study done by the University of Miami found that unattractive men were only 9% less likely to get married than conventionally attractive men, whereas unattractive women were 21% less likely. 

A short video of Dustin Hoffman talking about his role, as a man pretending to be a woman, in the film Tootsie reveals an epiphany he had during a make up test. He is upset to find that they can't make his character look more conventionally attractive and realises that this shouldn't be the priority of his character. He knew that his character was very interesting but if she isn't beautiful, can she not be taken seriously? Hoffman then explains his realisation that he's probably missed the chance to get to know so many interesting women, simply because they weren't attractive enough and therefore there was no point at the time to get to know them.

This reminded me of another short video of Lupita Nyongo's speech at the annual Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon. She talks about the days as a young girl when she would feel ugly because of the dark colour of her skin.
'I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman who looked so much like me, as beautiful.'
She says in reference to her witnessing the model, Alek Wek coming in to the spotlight at a time where beauty was only represented with white and light skinned faces. It's a perfect example of seeing is believing but also she goes on to explain that by getting over this milestone, of feeling beauty on the outside, she can then feel her beauty present on the inside. 

So, looking back to Lena Dunham's character in Girls, perhaps we need to represent different girls as men have been represented for a lot longer and treat it as not a big deal. It shouldn't be used like how so many mediums have used conventionally beautiful people to make money. Perhaps it just needs to simply be there.

First Stages of Secondary Research

I had in mind a lot of different things to look at, in reference to the relationships of different people and attractions between them.

Firstly there was Catfish, a documentary film about a photograher's online relationship with a young model who turns out to be a middle aged housewife hiding behind somebody else's profile picture and a facebook account that's made up of the perfect person she wished she could be. What I found relieving was the way they presented her as a human being and not some kind of 'cyber creep' that a conventionally unattractive person could be seen as when hoping to be with someone visually the opposite of them. What I found also interesting was the fact that they were able to make a Catfish television show, meaning that so many other people were experiencing these online relationships. So many people were willing to hide who they were, in order to enjoy a romantic relationship with someone they admired.

A shorter film that I came across recently filmed an experiment between different strangers who were paired up and told to kiss in front of the camera. At first, I thought the awkward but flirtatious body language of these different people was quite sweet and once they got in to it it looked like they were quite happy with who they were with then and there. However, an article I later found discussing the video revealed that it was actually a clothing advertisement and all of these strangers were picked from a list of models, musicians and actors. It wasn't as random as it was made out to be and in fact it was yet another product of a fantasy world where everyone is conventionally beautiful and comfortable to be attracted to each other because of that default attraction.

After this artsy black and white film, a bundle of parodies came following after and one of those was one using very average looking people found on the street who were willing to kiss a stranger, in front of the camera for £20. The video was a lot more awkward and had less giggling from the people and more sloppy noises of lips smacking on each other. It really made the first kiss not seem as beautiful as the original black and white film and I liked that about it. It showed how the beauty of romance, in many films with a meeting between two strangers, is extremely forced and pieced together. Romance in real life is meant to be beautiful between the people involved and that's what matters. It also helps if they have more of a choice to fall for each other and perhaps haven't just met. 

A documentary television series I have been watching at the moment, 'First Dates' I think was one of the reasons I wanted to go in to the theme of this project in the first place. It follows the experiences of different singles who get set up, by the makers of the program, with each other and we see what happens on their first date at the same restaurant. As we see these new relationships unwind, whether they're friendly, flirty, minimal or a complete mismatch, most of what we think about is what's being said and revealed about themselves to the other person. One date that I foufound very interesting was between A womwoman in her forties with a young man in his mid twenties. He found her mature company a lot more pleasant than the company of someone his own age and at first she enjoyed his too until she realised that the age gap was much more than a number for her. However, it was a perfect example of the attattraction between two people's different chacharacters. 

Another teltelevision series that I had been watching at the time, I found was a perfect example of how the 'beauty on the inside' point isn't as easy to follow when you've lived most of your life feeling ugly on the outside. Even when the main character gets the guy, she feels she'd rather break up with her boyfriend than be thrown dirty looks by people who couldn't understand why they were together. It follows many other problems, revolving around Rae Earl and her anxiety but most of the episodes also deal with her problems as a teenage girl and trying to be normal.

It reminded me of another television show I had been watching called Girls which follows the life of, New York girl, Hannah and her journey from a quite whiny, bratty girl in to the early stages of adulthood. What I like about it is the idea that it doesn't make a fuss over her relationships in a way that a Dove's beauty campaign would. Lena Dunham (the writer and actress of the show) is not seen as conventionally attractive. She is over weight, flat chested (as seen from many nude scenes which she creates for herself) and short. She creates a story where, what we wouldn't expect from a mainstream television show just happens naturally. It highlights that there shouldn't be such a big deal about it. For example, the episode 'One Man's Trash' consists of Hannah having a two day fling with a wealthy, divorced business man. They meet due to her sneaking her work's rubbish in to his rubbish bin and after he complains to her manager, she goes round to personally apologise. The title of the episode, itself, refers to the idea that 'one man's trash is another man's treasure' and, as seen from the backlash from the public on internet forums and web articles' comment sections stating that 'a guy like that would NEVER go for a girl like Hannah' in a way, it seemed as if Dunham was expecting it. She was the trash to some men, but a treasure to this man.

A bundle of famous fairytale films which I wanted to examine were films such as Princess and the Frog, Beauty and the Beast, and Shrek. All of them start with two quite different people coming together because they have to, only to find that they really want to stay together. The older tale of princess and the frog is unlike the Disney film where instead of both being frogs, and working together to change back in to humans, the princess simply kisses a frog to find that he's a handsome prince and they live happily ever after. I don't know how long they've built up this relationship for,which we see a development in the story of the Beauty and the Beast, but it doesn't seem like a very fair message for the princess to spare love to even the most disgusting creatures thus transforming them in to something truly beautiful. It's the same with the Beauty and the Beast. Although Belle gets to know the Beast and turn him in to a pleasant person, she only stays there because she is kept prisoner. Both stories show these women having to keep in mind that surely under that disgusting first glance, there's somebody beautiful on the inside. 

In Shrek, the princess has to deal with the wrong prince charming taking saving her from the tower and taking her to marry Lord Farquad. The long journey is how she deals with getting to know and eventually befriending this ogre. They also find that they have things in common to the point where she is found to turn in to an ogre herself, every night. At the end of the story, they end up marrying each other and therefore this bounds Fiona to her ogre body due to being with Shrek. At first, I thought this was a nice equal thing that also showed he cared more for her beauty as a person rather than simply how she looked. However, why did she need to stay as an ogre? It was a curse put on her. A part of herself that was thrown on her from outside sources and, in some cases, kept her back from doing the things she wanted to do. This part of her shouldn't be all that she is. Why couldn't she stay in her human form and exaggerate the point in the story that because looks don't matter so much, different looking people can still pair up.

At the moment there's still a lot of research I'm trying to plough through and also define their necessities to my project. I have a number of ideas that I'm hoping to understand before I go any further but I feel as if a complete change in direction might come about.

Visits to National and V&A Galleries

 I decided to go to the V&A and the National galleries to look at how artists from older eras pictured attractive humans in their work. The few that interested me the most were those that presented very opposite ideas of beauty to present day presentations. 

The first image shows a collection of rather voluptuous, curvy women walking around in the nude. Compared to well known photographs of our present day models, they would probably be labelled as plus size. Perhaps, during the time of the painting's production, it was a privilege to be well fed and therefore showed that the woman was probably from a wealthy family which was very attractive. 

The Death of Eurydice by Niccolo Dell'Abate

At the bottom right corner of the above image, we can see quite a muscular old man leaning casually on his side. Similar to this man, we can see in the image below that this depiction of the Holy family has, a much older, Joseph looking over at his wife, who is a lot younger, breastfeeding a baby Jesus. It shows the idea that older and younger men were more accepted and appreciated through visual representation in paintings as well as, during that era, the possibility of it being far less irregular for an older man to marry and have children with a woman. 

The Madonna of the Cat by Federico Baurecci

Some strong, beautiful male characters from old mythical tales were depicted as very elegant and almost quite feminine. I'm not sure whether this was the artists' idea of attractive or, at the time, grace and youthful features in men was very much appreciated. Either way, one was effected by the other.

Apollo and Zephyr by Pietro Francavilla

Cupid Kindling the Torch of Hymen by George Remi

If I had more time, I would have recorded more ideas for the project and perhaps visited a few more galleries to see if there were any other contributing factors to the same themes I was finding. However, I am quite glad with what I've come across. From this, I've learnt a lot about past influences in traditional art by the ideas of what is seen as attractive and also the contrast in today's ideas of beauty. 

Start of Final Major Project

When coming up with a starting point for this project, I asked myself the question 'what parts of life interest me?' One of my main interests revolve around people's attractions to each other and how I've found out from my experiences that there is so much more than a typical power couple out of a cheesy Disney or Hollywood rom-com film. 

For one thing, there is the LGBTQUA movement fighting for the improvement of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Undefined and Asexual people's rights thus making their place in the media, and therefore to many people around the world, more visible and accepted.

But even in heterosexual relationships, who are basically the default for many western cultured romance stories, they usually match in relation to their conventional, visual attractiveness (slim/muscular, white and a pleasant but fairly usual personality).

This is quite worrying when we take in to account the self esteem of the audience, who pays most attention to the mainstream media. Teenagers. Although this group gets a lot of media focus already and it could be argued that they don't need to be kept in mind constantly due to older adults being flung out of a story and replaced with more youthful characters, to some extent they are the group who use the media not only for entertainment (and more than we've ever used it in history) but also for learning about the world we're growing in to. A film about an older generation that doesn't apply to a more youthful audience is still something they can learn from. They can learn that they are people too, with life experiences that can still apply to us and that goes for other groups of different people who are usually ignored too.

That's when representation comes in. By not representing a group of people/situation, it's almost like throwing them/it aside in the idea that they/it's has no interesting subjects or entertaining elements for us. Learning isn't necessarily the priority when it comes to people trying to make money out of their shows, however I feel like it should be treated as such when it definitely has this impact on people.

When it comes to attraction, the spark of puberty and hormone activity makes teenagehood the start of allowing us to see people as more than just friends. So how do we deal with it? What makes us feel certain feelings, to what extent do we enjoy it, obsess over it and feel uncomfortable by it? More importantly, are we accepted when it comes to what we feel attracted to? Us as humans usually look for some kind of order in life so it is only expected that we try following some system that points out what is what, when in some cases it's really a construct of society. 

There is a lot of themes and sub-themes within this idea which I hope to look in to and, more importantly, narrow down. Perhaps at some point I can start specifying or maybe even look in to a section that I find more important to me. Either way, I feel like I will work very hard with the following ideas I've already come up with.