Initial style ideas for the Group project

We have 5 Scenes for our animation:

• Ipod- Modern Times
• Walkman- 80's 
• Stereo- 1920-1960's 
• Vinyl- 1906-1920
• Phonograph- 1877-1900

We are thinking for having a progressively changing style for each of these scenes to fit with the times and to make it a lot more interesting. So starting off with the first scene I've been looking at different types of styles of animation that I think express modern times quite well.

This first animation although a good style for modern I think it might work really well for the Stereo time period, also if we did use it to show the 1920's style it would fit well with the progressing from 3D to 2D style. 

Quite like the idea of this one might be interesting to do something similar that uses image planes but with lots of texture. 

I posted this one before but I still think it's quite an interesting style and If we go for a progressive animation style that starts off with 3D and becomes more 2D as we go through each scene this style would be a nice way to start off in 3D that already looks very sketch like and would progress well into 2D. 

The next scene is a little harder, instead of looking at animations I thought I would look at posters and art style at the time, getting inspiration from that and integrating it into our animation.

Being a little more difficult I think the style that we chose for this scene really depends on how we start off the animation and how we want to finish if we are going to have just a lot of different styles together or one that becomes progressively more 2D.

Not sure where this style would fit in but I do quite like it and it could be quite interesting to intergrate into our animation. 

Refined Group Idea

After getting a little feedback on our first group idea Alan suggested we add more to it that we were heading in the right direction we just needed to add a bit more substance to it. So as a basic outline the following is our more refined group idea.

• Our character is on a train plugged into his iPod completely oblivious to anything around him. Zooming into whats on his iPod its some cover art from the 80's, zooming into that it becomes a poster on a wall in our character bedroom.
• Panning across from the poster you settle on the character whose dancing around the room listening to their Walkman and they knock over a box and out pops an old dusty radio. The camera rotates so the radio is the right way up.
• Zooming out you see the radio become brand new and its sitting on a shelf in a living room playing a famous speech from Churchill. Zooming into the speaker it becomes a vinyl record that's playing a waltz type song. 
• Panning around you see our character practicing dancing with a broomstick, they get interrupted by a knock on the door, dropping the broomstick they head towards the door. The whole scene then reverses itself back through the dancing with the broomstick and to when he entered the room from a different door. 
• Going through that door it's an inventors room with lots of ideas on the wall and you follow the character who sits at the desk and on the desk is the blue prints and idea from the phonograph. 

There are still a few bits that need to be fiddled with and we need to put this idea into script format but this is the basic story we are working with. Alan says that we really need to focus on the style of our animation for this idea to work well and be interesting as it's quite linear. So something as a group we need to figure out is how we are going to style the animation to make it work. 

Key Ideas

Before our tutorial with Alan on Tuesday we met up as a group and each proposed the ideas we had come up with over the weekend. All of us had about two and we narrowed it down to our favourite 3 ideas, which were then proposed to Alan. Below is the mind map we made about the key ideas.

Although Alan like our ideas and felt each had it's merits he said that each had flaws, either it was to long and wouldn't fit in a minute or they had pieces missing such as a proper ending, so we had to re-think the direction we were going in.

Story ideas

I was looking into the social effects of the industrial revolution and I became quite interested in how it effected the farmers in a negative way. I don't have properly formed ideas that have a beginning and an end I just have starting points that could be formed into a more elaborate story.

Idea 1
One of my ideas for a story is showing the life of one farmer and how when the industrial revolution started they were forced to buy new machinery to be able to keep up with the times. The farmer goes into debt purchasing new machinery to discover they could farm more land to pay off the machine. They then go into debt to buy new land to pay off the machinery only to find they needed more and/or larger machines to do the work on the increased area they are farming. And this is like a small cycle.

Idea 2
The over population of London at the time was from the large amount of people that were moving from farms to the city. Following the life of a young teenage boy that leaves his farm and family to move to the big city of London in hopes of making something more of his life. He gets to the city starts work in a factory and fast forward a few years it shows you that he's gone from the happy you man he was to a run down unhappy man that works on a factory assembly line, he goes back to his dingy tiny apartment that barley fits his bed, and it continues to show what his life has become.

The below animations are just some animations I came across that I quite liked their style. Their content doesn't have anything to do with the industrial revolution.

What is the Industrial Revolution?

After talking to Alan our group realized we were heading a little in the wrong direction as the industrial revolution was occurring in Europe and American in our given time period and unless we had a very strong reason for doing so trying to place our animation in another country like Asia it wouldn't really be considered showing the industrial revolution. Keeping that in mind I thought I would look back at the basics and find what the industrial revolution was really all about. This research actual gave me a few idea which I will propose to the group later today.

What is the Industrial Revolution by Kym Mumford

The Industrial Revolution (1800-1900)

We have just been briefed on our group project and given our groups. I'm in group 4 with Anass and Peta-gaye, our time period and cultural reference is The Industrial revolution (1800-1900). We decided to start out with a bit of research and gave ourselves each a topic to look into. I'm going to be looking into the art, style, of the era. My research is just a brief over view of this and will be gone in greater depth when it comes to character research. This is just to get a better feel of the art direction we will be going in and get a better sense of the era we are looking at.

Initial Style Research by Kym Mumford

New Group Blog

For our narrative project we have a group blog between Anass, Peta-gaye and myself. So please can you all follow it :).

http://digital-delusion.blogspot.co.uk/