Applied Animation: Untitled Documentary Animation Project - Developing Our Idea

So we came into this pretty eager. Matt had had an incredibly bizarre dream the night before and then the three of us discussed the idea of doing an animation based around dreams. This is a subject all three of us were very interested in and I had made an animation based around around a dream in the past so had good experience. But even though we had good animation ideas such as strutting the animation as if it's one dream leading into another, we had a major obstacle too tackle, how were we going to make this a documentary? We thought about the possibility about not having it as a documentary about dreams, but about people who dream and we could interview people about the dreams they had and what it meant to them. But we received feedback that it may be a bit of a clique. With this worry in mind and not a strong enough reason to stay with the idea we decided to drift away from the idea of making it about dreams and having our theme be that of 'mental health' which is a very tough subject to tackle effectively anyway.

(The Sopranos - The Test Dream)

We decided to move away from mental health and have a think about the other themes. We even thought about the theme of 'sport', a subject none of us were too confident about. The idea we had about this theme was making a mock-umentary sports documentary about bringing back the sport of gladiators to a modern audience.

The idea of doing a mock-documentary was very popular amongst the three of us. Both Matt and I enjoy working together because we like to not really do what we're told and surprise people by going against what is expected of us. It's not our way of 'rebelling against the system' it's just our way of keeping ourselves interested and passionate about what we're doing by doing something that people don't believe we can do and trying to prove people wrong, even if we often fail.

Another idea we had was to do a mock-relationship-documentary. The synopsis was that it would start with an interviewer/cameraman filming a couple at a table on their honey moon for example. The interview is just a standard couple interview with questions such as 'How did you meet?' so obviously it's not particularly interesting for the viewer to watch, or the cameraman. So in the background weird stuff begins to happen such as strange characters emerge and start performing a satanic ritual or human sacrifice for example. The cameraman slowly pans from the couple to focus on the madness going on in the background. Things get more and more out of control and eventually he gets spotted filming them and the cult members chase him down, knocking the camera and the footage cuts to black.

Upon asking for feedback, they decided that the last couple-moc-doc was the strongest and I feel it was the idea we each felt most passionate about so decided to develop this one further.