OUAN503 - Collaborative, Final Idea

As this was the first time we had collaborated across courses, it became apparent to me how important it was to make time as a group to organise sessions where we can get together and speak in person regarding our ideas and progress through the project. After having a couple of sessions together and attempting to collect the samples of voice recordings to continue with our initial idea of having children narrate the story, we had a timetabled responsive session. During the responsive session we were given some important information and asked if we had any questions regarding the hand in dates or anything surrounding the D&AD or YCN briefs. Following on from this we had the rest of the session to go away and work on what we liked in relation to the responsive module, so we took the time to get together in our group and finalise our idea.

To me personally and I'm sure everyone else in the group, it was important that we had an idea solidified and ready to be worked on from this point forward because we were already in the middle of February and hadn't begun the production or even the pre-production stages of the three 20 second animations we had planned to create. I believe this was simply due to the difficulties in communication and the struggle of implementing the first idea we had made it so we were behind on our project in terms or progress. I suggested that we pick one of our other ideas, the one we liked the most and went with that. The benefit of using one of our other ideas is that we weren't relying on any outside sources for the material, and we could essentially get on with our brief. It was unfortunate but I think it was important that at this point we cut our losses with the time we had spent, and I think we all agreed on that. The idea we chose to pursue was integrating different cultures and showing the parallels between them across the three animations we had to make. Initially we thought this was a strong idea because of the possibilities in terms of narrative, meaning it could accommodate the storyarch element of the brief. Furthermore, the culture aspect and the way in which certain areas of the world live is a nice take on the everyday storytelling element that was required by the brief. My thinking in regards to this was that across the world people endure very different 'everyday lives' and it would be interesting to attempt to portray this idea across our three stories. The process for coming up with the narratives was fairly straight forward and everyone pitched in with suggestions about the storytelling itself. We chose three contrasting storyarchs that we liked the most and that we thought could work well given the context of our themes. The storyarchs that we were most interested in were; The Quest, Rags to Riches and Overcoming the Monster. Afterwards we chose three locations from around the world and thought about the food culture in each one of them, bearing in mind the idea of contrast lives represented through food we came up with Paris, France; Hong Kong and the US.

With a month left we made a conscious decision to make sure we had an outline for our narratives that we could all then take away and start working on. Once we had a simple story outline as a group and individually we could begin creating storyboards and planning the individual animations so that we can start production as soon as possible. The story set in the US came quite naturally to us, and we thought it would be fun to show a competitive eater undertaking a food challenge - this fit quite nicely under the 'Overcoming the Monster' storyarch in which the food challenge takes the place of the monster, in quite a humorous way, and the main character behaves like the hero that has to overcome the challenge. During this section of the brief I felt that the process of creating stories which could be told like this in just 20 seconds, especially with the storyarch aspect would be difficult, and in reflection it was a really difficult task to make sure there was a solid story that was being well communicated in a concise and entertaining way. This aspect of the brief was definitely a learning curve for me and taught me a lot about storytelling as a whole. Often I hear stories from now successful chefs that Paris is the place to be to learn culinary skills and it's where a lot of people go to learn their craft. The 'Rags to Riches' story felt like a natural fit with the food culture in Paris, with the case often being you work your way up from the bottom when entering a kitchen job for the first time. As a group we liked the idea of showing within the 20 second time frame the evolution of a pot wash or assistant in a bakery working his way up the ladder, so the idea here was established. I think the most difficult storyarch to satisfy was 'The Quest', because it's quite a hard task to tie this in with food. We decided it could still work if we were a little more abstract and the storyarch didn't have to dictate the story so literally if it didn't work. We discussed the idea of depicting the journey of food in a market to table type of scenario. Where we show each part of the process from when fresh food is sitting in a market, to being served in a restaurant.

It was a good feeling to finally have an idea we could work on as a group. We talked about the process of pre-production, production and post-production and distributed roles and specific scenes that people were going to draw, colour and animate. The first job however was story boarding, and planning the visual representation of the story through characters, use of camera and action. So we gave ourselves around three days to produce these and meet up again. From this point on we have to work quite efficiently so that the D&AD deadline is met.