Applied Animation: Our New Final Idea

For inspiration when we were desperately trying to come up[ with a new idea that was original, interesting and we were passionate about, I looked at other documentaries for inspiration. I looked up articles such as The 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time and The 50 Weirdest Documentaries of All Time and I also thought about my favourite documentaries.

The above are some of my favourite documentaries, but they all share something in common, whether their about geniuses of animation, troubled artists or mass murderers, they are all about incredibly fascinating people. What I struggled with was that I don't know anyone like that, don't get me wrong I know some fascinating people, but I don't know enough about them to document them, I spend most my hours at the moment in college. 

Then I remembered something. When you've got writers block or in this case animators block of which I've had for a while, write what you know or animate what you know, and what do we know? Animators. 

We came up with the idea that we could create an animated documentary that over ten years follows two animators who are making an animation that they believe will 'make them'. But as they get more and more into the project, their own personal lives begin to fall apart and by the end of the ten years they have become so obsessed with what they're working on that essentially they've lost everything else as well as they're grips on reality itself.

Matt and Jemma liked the idea very much but Matt was concerned about how heavy the subject was and how these characters are basically myself and Matt. I reassured him that these characters, at this place in time also called Matt and Max are entirely fictitious versions of ourselves and this whole animation, although based partially on reality is a satire and very much an exaggerated version of the animator student world we live in.

Then to add a level of deepness to the idea, we decided to make this animation a 'blood relative' of mine and Matt's previous animated collaboration The Void. In The Void we made appearances as fictitious versions of ourselves where we interacted with the animated 3D characters that we created.

Well in this new animation we car up with the idea that it is told from the perspective of the animators and certain things about The Void become explained. For example, how can an animated character have freewill to kill another animated character and interact with the animators who created it? Simple, it can't. It's all imagined and in the heads of the animators. In The Void, the 3D animated character Number 1 has killed off 53 other animated characters that the animators have created to interact with Number 1 and complete the animation. Their excuse for why it's taken them so long to complete the animation is that the animated character they created keeps on killing off the other animated characters they place into the world so they can never complete it. But when you think about it, this makes no sense at all and obviously shows the animators are loosing the plot.

So in conclusion our animated documentary appears to be about two animators making what they consider to be an amazing animation that will 'make them' but really it's about two guys basically loosing their grips on reality. The audience will never actually see the animation that their making or know what it's about, or whether it even actually exists.