Applied Animation: Untitled Animation Documentary Project - Research

After deciding to go for the couple mock-documentary idea we decided that since we had basically two weeks off with the assessment weeks so we each decided to go off and gather as much research for the subject as we could. And when I say 'subject' I mean 'subjects' such as…

• Satanic Rituals
• Couples
• Romance
• Found Footage Documentaries
• Human Sacrifice
• Honeymoon videos

As you can see this two minute documentary covers a wide range of stuff so it's important that we come into it knowing what we are doing. My job was to go off and research satanist cults and sacrifices, basically the messed up stuff that happens in the moc-doc.

I looked at a wide range of sources for inspiration. I feel it's always important to initially start off by putting together a bunch of imagery in a mood-board-like fashion to get ideas, these were the images I was able to gather that I felt would fit the tone we were going for…

Most of the below images aren't really specific to anything in particular, they just to me fit the mood of what I want to go for with the second half of the mod-doc, e.g. disturbing, unsettling, dark humour...

When thinking about this project the artist Aphex Twin would stick in my mind. Often when I look at his visual work and music work I feel he tries for a similar outcome as us to disturb the audience and make them uncomfortable but still keep with a dark humour tone.

The film Kill List by Ben Wheatley is also a fairly major inspiration for me with this project so I will advise Jemma and Matt to watch it too.

The Chemical Brothers also include a lot of very weird stuff in their work. For example, when I saw them last year at Glastonbury, when they began performing the song Elektrobank a guy appeared on screen covered in strange white powder shouting the exact same sentence into an orange phone over and over again. It was quite unsettling to watch but also very entertaining and comical.