Final Statement

At first, the project started with me going down quite a different route. I wanted to display this idea that people of different appearances didn't have to be at a same conventionally attractive level to be acceptable. The project developed in to how females deal with the issues surrounding their appearance, mainly due to me realising the earlier idea for the project was more based on the idea that I don't see myself as conventionally attractive and in a harsh society where the majority of men will probably see a woman who looks like the opposite to me (slim and white) as attractive, finding outliers whether it were straight girls, boys, lesbians, bi-sexuals or gay men who adored the way someone who didn't fit the conventional idea of beauty, would be extremely refreshing and stop me from making a conclusion that I have to make sure my personality perfect if I want any romantic relations with anybody.

But the more I thought about why I wanted to do this, I felt like the reason for why wasn't following the right path. I needed to look in to why I cared so much and why it has haunted my life as a teenage girl. There are problems in the world far worse than feeling undesirable but when it gets to the point where self hate comes out of the mental and in to the physical, things can get very scary. I witnessed it from four of my friends and advice from one of their doctor's during her struggles with anorexia, even if it kind of worked, was 'you know most guys won't want to go out with a really skinny girl.' This was scary how much we saw value in the way men looked at us.
So I went out of relationships and in to the positive vs. negative experiences with females and their bodies. I exaggerate the word females rather than women, in reference to sex rather than gender, ainly due to even trans men dealing with fighting against the expectations of a person with a vagina having to conform to feminine dresses or sexy lingerie.

I feel like the most stressful part was simplifying the bundle of research already gathered. I had a lot to look at, to work out what message I was planning on specifying in my animation. In a way, I had gone from a more specific idea to a more complicated one. Issues with how a female feels about their body is so much more than just about how she wants to look attractive to the boy she finds attractive. However, I did piece together the right information and set a steady foundation on what I wanted my concept to revolve around.

When it came to animating, I think what was not so successful was not having a definite idea that I could start animating soon enough. By doing this, it would have left me more time to work on sound such as recording voices for characters, collecting and putting background noises together. However, I am happy with the outcome. What was expected was somewhat achieved with a bit extra. An animated music video. At a later date I could add different sounds. I have other songs I'd wish to put an animation to and next time I think I'll try different mediums. After a while, I felt stuck and not able to experiment with textures due to the simple block colours the Flash software provides for animating.

I was given a lot of helpful advice from peers and staff that helped form my main ideas. Questions helped me put together what I needed to make clearer and what messages I had to try and exaggerate the importance of and their necessity to the story. However, I will admit I felt very driven by more of my ideas than anyone elses. It could be seen as a positive but to some extent it kept me a bit closed minded from a few suggestions seeing as I wanted to get away from doing yet another load of research that I had already been looking at. Next time, I intend to take suggestions a bit more seriously and dedicate some time to looking in to them more but keep in mind that I know what I'm passionate about and it being my project, with a message that effects me most, should prioritise what I see important.

All in all, I think the project went the way I wanted it to. There were a few problems but they were small and not too hard to deal with. I feel like this is the first project I have achieved something with a medium I see important to me and a subject that I see important to me.

Finished Editing on Entire Film

Finally, after animating the credits, I ended up putting together all the scenes which I had animated and exported to mp4s separately. Due to the last scene not being able to save properly in the production stages, I had to make sure I had as many copies and different file formats to have just in case. 

In the end, I was able to balance out the music beside the film and make them compliment each other. They were in tune with the mood of the scenes and the rhythm of each other went fairly well. 

There weren't too many problems apart from the credits being quite short but I just made the animated titles loop for a bit to lengthen them out and give the audience a chance to read them properly. 

I feel like I could have added more sound rather than simply music but when it came to it, I think most of the project's time spent on researching, preparing to animate and actually animating, meant I couldn't do too much when it came to pieceing the sound together.

Editing Last Parts of Music

Already I had been working on the actual song I was hoping to use, for a while, so editing it to be used in my animation really consisted of tidying up what was there and cutting the original song down from 7 minutes to 1 minute.

Cutting the song down.

Editing the sound levels.

It was quite sad having to chop out some of my favourite parts but the reality of it was to cut it down or do a hefty load of more animating which I didn't really have the time for when i already had a good simple story and scenes. 

I think if I stuck to my original plan of creating a song from scratch, it would have been a lot harder with working a lot on something completely different from the prior skills I needed to develop and present in this project. 

I think working on my music for myself rather than having a strict deadline is quite nice because what comes out of it is always very natural and it can be added to whenever without worrying about what's necessary and not. From that I can always have something to use for background music and cut out what I find unnecessary for the certain project.

In order to match the song well with the film, I plan on editing the a good fade in, fade out intro and outro. I think this could be done well with the opening title and end credits. 

Animating Scene 5

For this scene I found it quite worrying to get done. There was something wrong with my Flash software due to the fact it wouldn't let me save, so I had to hope for the best that nothing crashed and keep going till it was finished. 

Because of not being able to save all of the changed in the scene, I have only been able to document the importing and presentation of the backgrounds.

Like the backgrounds in the other scenes, I created them by hand, using watercolour paints and then scanned them in. In this scene I had to create a similar sunset like composition with rectangle shapes of buildings in the foregrounds. 

I came across a tutorial by my favourite artist/illustrator, Emmy Cicierega, which showed how to make a brush in photoshop that looked like rain drops. From this I was able to save images of my background where I added in the drops bit by bit. 

The scene of the girls coming together under the umbrella and giving and accepting help from each to shelter from the rain is meant to show the positive and kind attitude which girls should try and have for each other to fight against the negative influences which most girls get taken over by.

With animating the last scene, I had to exaggerate the character's expressions when communicating with each other as well as to the audience. It is one of my favourite parts about animating, as I enjoy putting across the feelings of the characters in to the story.

Animating Scene 4

This is the rather important scene where we see the interesting ways that the remaining characters try and take down the 'perfect' giant woman. 

In this part I wanted the insides of the giant woman to hint to a number of what our insecurities revolve around.

I feel like in this part I could have exaggerated the giant woman's faces of pain a bit more seeing as they were fun to do but don't go so noticed.

I was happy to be able to re-use the water colour waves again in this scene where a whirlpool begins to curl around the characters.

I found this scene quite enjoyable to create seeing as it consists of a lot of exciting movements and action. The next scene will be a lot more settled down with more expressions of the characters being their main part of communication to each other and the audience which is good for a balance between the ways I've been animating during this part of of the film. 

Backgrounds and Animating Scene 3

I scanned the pictures of waves which I had animated by hand on paper and coloured with pink watercolour paints and improved them with a photoshop brush that imitates water colours. I then deleted the white space and saved them as png. files.

I did this with each frame of the waves and put them in to their own layer on flash. 

This transitions in to us going under the waves and seeing the characters floating around and transforming in to their 'perfect' versions of themselves (e.g. a disabled girl having fit able-legs and an older woman transforming in to a young school girl). In this part I shortened my time animating the people from areas of the screen to simply copy and pasting the images around the screen to show their movement. 

The next part to animate I think was, similarly to the head shake, very hard in trying to get perspective and angles of the body right in the movements. It has the main character throwing a high heeled shoe towards the camera. These animated parts, however, I find the most exciting to do, because in cases where I get it a bit right, it turns out looking really nice.

With this scene I think I have shown different ways of animating. From hand drawn to digital, to moving around simple still images. Again, I feel like I am moving at a good pace and am thinking, maybe I could re-use the waves for another scene. 

Backgrounds and Animating Scene 2

With these two backgrounds, I made them from one background and zoomed in to a section where I felt the colours worked well (e.g light floor to darker sky for the panning up of the giant woman's feet to face).

This background I had the less blocky and not so balanced colours of the girl's lilac skin contrast with the flawless and smooth block colour of the giant woman's magenta skin colour.

In this part I had to try and establish a good turn of the head so I roughly sketched out a sphere turning before adding the facial features and then the block colour of the skin.

The last part was animating the hands, unscrewing and applying lipgloss from a bottle which will go in to the next scene where the lipgloss will fall from the bottle and create waves all over the ground and take up the people and in to the waves. I plan on creating the waves in fluid water colours so will have to probably do these on to paper rather than digitally. 

I feel like after this scene, I'm coming along with the film at a good pace. 

More Backgrounds and Starting to Animate Scene 1

With animating, I started off doing a few sketches of how I imagined the skeletons moving through a walk cycle for different characters. I had to think about the attitude and personalities of the characters in how they walked as the walk cycle's purpose was meant to show how different they all are.

So after I had taken photos of these sketches, I put them in the background of a flash document as a guideline for each character. I drew the skeletons as a first layer.

Then, I went over the skeletons in a layer of colour that suited each character. For example, a pink for what we would consider the most feminine and a dark green for what we could consider the most masculine character. As well as this, I drew each character their own body shape. These shapes were the most imporant in the story to again focus on the character's diverse appearance and how it is impossible for one body type to represent all of them.

After the shapes, I went over in black lines to hint to some more of the characters' features. The clothes were important to some. For example, a boyish hat, baggy jeans and tank top were necessary to hint to the transgender man. He is one character I thought was necessary to include and present in this story due to having to run away from a strong and toxicly gripping identity that many people born with a Y chromosome are just expected to fit in to. 

After animating the walk cycle I decided to put in the background. A watercolour wash of pastel sunset colours I felt were necessary to hint to reality but still the very present features of femininity which linger round the characters in their awkward and un-enlightened day to day life. 

I wanted to add something to the city scape instead of simple but bold blocks of colour so found a nice brush on photoshop to customise simple block shapes I made on MSPaint, a simple but reliable program. 

From this I made copies over and over by each other and put them together as a PNG before adding the to the background on Flash. I made the city scape move along side the characters and their different paces of walking.

A scene consisted of the background zooming in and changing colour as it does, so I edited the background on photoshop to get the colours right for the next part of the animation.

I was happy how this process went and intend to try and animate in the same way with the next scenes. The simple watercolour backgrounds were not too chaotic to do and also I felt very happy with their fluid looking outcomes. 

The Meaning of the Story

After talking over with a few tutors what my story was about, I felt like the way I was explaining it wasn't being understood the way I saw it or the way I was explaining it wasn't coming out how I needed to tell the story that was still quite roughly put together. Through answering questions about what the story was actually trying to say, I finally asked myself.

Unlike, the body positive movement that focuses on different women of different shapes, sizes and backgrounds, smiling and enjoying their bodies in a Dove advert, there isn't really an obvious explanation for why this happiness with in themselves is a big deal. Why is it special that they are happy? I don't want to make this about self love. I want it to be about fighting against self hate. Self hate is way too easy to fall in to and be dominated and taken over by. That's what the monstrous 'perfect woman' I feel truly represents. At first it was all about not letting outside sources stop you from loving and appreciating all you are. Not letting outside sources change who you are. But at the end of the day, if you are overweight and feel physically unhealthy but don't want to change, in fear of losing a battle against the beauty industry, it can end up with you sacrificing your physical health to try and look for happiness in your mental health.
It may not be exactly the same, but if there is help out there for a disabled person to perhaps learn how to walk again, loving the body they have to refuse improvement in their physical being isn't something I'd see as healthy.

The other day I had quite a negative anonymous message, commenting on what I post on on my personal Tumblr blog. It seemed to bring out a response from me which I think worked with what I was saying in my film:

‘You do know it can be really and I mean REALLY unhealthy to be the size of some of the girls you reblog, I 

get you can be any shape you want and look beautiful and all that but its not healthy after a certain extent and I dont think it should be promoted...’

I reblog a lot of images of different sized girls. If you're referring to the larger ladies then:

Go tell this to the whole fashion industry. Whilst we can accept girls slimming down, we'll only get worried 

when we can see a bit of rib and then we'll be concerned when it's usually too late. 

Four of my friends had eating disorders. Three of them we only noticed until it was time for them to go to

 hospital. That's sickening to think about. One of them we didn't even realise because she she wasn't stick thin and that's terrible.

When it's a fat girl's health we're talking about, not only do we see it as unhealthier than a girl starving herself and going through mental fuck ups to be what the world considers is 'perfect' (it doesn't purely revolve around that but is one factor for many cases of eating disorders) but she isn't even shown concern. 

Quite the opposite, fat girls are hurtled with discouraging words of hate.

I don't reblog these images of girls cos i think they are perfect. none of the girls thin/curvy/fat i think are

 perfect. I don't know these girls. I don't know how their body works. For some of them their metabolism may

 work that way and in fact they are physically healthy but their fat is distributed a different way from the 

women we're used to seeing. Perhaps she is physically unhealthy and could cut down on some foods or 

exercise more. 

Again, I DON'T KNOW THEM. 

I'm not promoting anything. I like what I see and reblog what I like.

What I see are girls who at that moment in time don't feel hateful of themselves. self hate is one of the most

 dangerous things someone can experience. You have so much power over yourself, you can use that to a

 terrible extent.

When people hate themselves they destroy themselves. Do you think picking on someone for being fat is

 going to motivate them? In a number of cases they will wither away and eat for comfort, destroying

 themselves even more. You NEED to let someone make healthy choices for their body on their own terms.

 Guidance is helpful but judgement is toxic. 

Go send your anon concerns to a pro- anorexia blog or a fat fetish blog where women's bodies 

are promoted completely unhealthily and for the wrong reasons. They need it more than I do...

Another issue I faced with the meaning of the story was when I was asked, 'why have the disabled person in at all? With something like that, it seems that a strong issue like this can take over the story' and I agreed to this point. I was wondering if I needed to stick to the body image theme more than these other issues such as race, age, disability and identity. However, I realised that I wanted to do so much more than the repetitive 'this pear shape girl feels unworthy cos she's not hourglass'. This has been done before and I really think that self hate over your appearance is more complicated than 'oh no I'm fat'.

Animatic and Background Colour Palettes

So far I have collected a few colour palettes for background ideas.

I wanted the 'real world' to consist of subtle girly colours. Subtle enough to be seen as part of a natural, beautiful sunset but still the pinks and lilacs hint to the quite un-natural, manufactured pretty things that are created by ourselves. 

In the deep pit of our minds shows the attractive but dark and toxic colours that can drown us in to thinking we as we are there and then aren't good enough. I wanted the colours to look rather un-natural yet very inviting. Pink and purple I thought were important as the main colours, as they're stereotypically feminine.

After some people get out of world in their minds, the real world, I plan on changing to less feminine and more gender neutral yet decoratively appealing colours. I also wanted it to be warmer and more natural, hence the greeny blues and oranges. 

As well as that, I've put together an animatic of what I pretty much plan on animating. There are parts I see as not entirely necessary but I plan on working on the strong, needed parts to explain the meaning of the story. 

Starting to Animate

When it came to animating, I started to think realistically how much am I going to get done in the time I have left of this project. With that in mind, I looked for examples of animation that use very simple shapes of colour to summarise the image of the characters bodies. A short french animation called 'Suzy's Willy' was a good example I found on the 'Animade' blog. 

I liked the simple use of shape and small detail in fine lines around the characters. I think what is good about this simple design for the characters is the fact I can exaggerate the shape of each person (which is what's quite important for the story). 

Final Character Designs and Storyboards

I was thinking over how the story of my animation could be less of a small summary of different people's lives and show more of a specific perspective through a person's experiences. From this, I looked back at an article from my mass collection of research and saw how the story could also apply to my own meaningful experiences. The article was titled 'Hollywood's Invisible Love Interest: the Overweight Black Woman' and it talked about how the most influential, powerful, film industry in the world was missing out a character which so many women would feel so happy to see presented in films. One of these women are myself and the reality feels like I either have to be slim and light skinned (me, being mixed race and lighter than some coloured women I am aware of is quite a privilege) or a sassy, dark, obese woman with sassy attitude and even then I'd be seen as a joke and not a human being. 

At first I did a rough storyboard of my perspective through a character I had designed. I wanted her to look quite feminine and girly yet desireable without too much of a sexy flair. I gave her quite short, afro hair and designed her curves and fat so that they were visible in, usually seen as quite unfortunate, areas but her posture in a pair of heels and confidence at the start of her walk made her look like a person we want to know about.

Sketches of different afro hair

Possible character designs

The story I came up with for this woman was quite long and although it was quite personal, I thought that I was missing out on what needed to be done and have it accomplished short and sweet.

I went back to my original story idea but thought the character that could apply most to me was the best to make as the main character.

Again, The final story I imagine I should work on specific parts in case all of it I can't do. I won't completely take them out of the story though, seeing as they are quite important.