During the first two weeks, for our ABFAB project “short shorts”, where were we are tasked to do a short animation video of 20 seconds where we present ourselves or a part of ourselves. I decided to do mine about a specific aspect of my life that I consider to be quite important, this is, the part of my life I was faced with independency and loneliness. The moment I left my parents and adventured for the first to go and live alone. It was right after a part of my life where the family started to go separate ways and so did I feel the need to do that myself and grow up.
During these first two weeks of my project I worked on my conceptualization and preproduction of the animation. Learning how to better organize and deliver a pitch like if it was for a real-life client.
First, I had to figure out how I could present this specific moment of my life, and since it is quite a personal subject, I decided to take a metaphorical approach, combining two topics I particularly like. Art and biology. I have been reading a book called “Self comes to mind” by Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese neuroscientist. In the book he explains how our will to live from the first unicellular organism, that also had this function: Survive as long as you can. He compares humans to cells. Cells went from unicellular to multicellular organisms when they found that they could join forces and create multicellular organisms that eventually created humans, same way humans join forces to survive more (societies and cultures).
Since this was a quite complicated comparison, I figured I could use simple abstract art and shapes (also relating to Saul Bass) to clearly explain it, plus it is a subject that is easily understood by various ages and backgrounds. The first thing that came to mind was non-objectivism, where artists like Miró, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Pollock expressed a lot with simple colours and shapes, creating a strong emotional impact with the viewers. I particularly inspired myself on Joan Miró, where his style reminded me that of Saul Bass.
To complement this I decided to give my animation a more spontaneous and abstract sound to it with Jazz.
Now to fit a strong metaphor into 20 seconds wasn’t particularly easy, and even though I was able to properly create a script and a visual style that represented my concept and story, I still feel like I need to change something for my story to be more infographic style and less abstract. I was able to produce an animatic that showed well where my project was going, but I think mostly, people understood it because I had already explained my concept to them with the pitch. So to improve my work Im going to explore voice over or implement keywords and/or phrases so that the message can be communicated more clearly. This feedback was very useful for me because I was not sure my concept was too personal. Apart from that people seemed quite interested and empathetic with the idea for my project.
If I could have changed something in my process during this phase, was to have focused more on the script earlier on, and better developed my idea being more careful with not making it too personal. During these first weeks I learned the importance of dedicating more time and giving better thought not to the final look of the project but to the ideation and preproduction of it. If well organized and structured, a project that is prepared for its process can truly give a strong backbones and structure to it. I learned different tools and techniques I can use during this phase, to improve my script writing, my storyboarding and conceptualization. Overall the first two weeks have helped me truly appreciate this process.
Samuel WorkWeek blog - Research 