Food for Thought - Pre Production - Idea Generation

For this year's final module, we are to either work individually or in groups of three in creating an animated documentary based around the theme of Food (You probably figure that out from the previous title blog post). This will technically be our first professional piece (Various supporting items will also be designed to go along with it, such as packaging, posters, etc.), that will be showcased to an audience for proper feedback.

The tone of the documentary can vary, it can either be serious and dark, or more light hearted and fun. Either way, I am thankful that we are once again given a pretty open theme to work with. What we definitely must consider is the amount of research that will go into our topic as well as least justify our reasons for choosing it in the first place.

I felt that I had a pretty productive first session with my group mates today (Or should I say yesterday), aside from throwing out a number of really interesting ideas during our discussion after we had absorbed the morning briefing (Because there seriously was a lot to take in), we were also able to choose one idea that we could all agree to happily work on on before class ended for the day. The good thing was that all three of us were actually pretty in sync with one another when it came to what we wanted to work on (Souls be resonating yo), and I suppose that's why the first part of our project went by so smoothly.

While I normally tend to make a GANTT chart a the very start of each project, I suppose it would make more sense to make one after our pitch on the 27th of February, where I can better figure out how the work will be divided between us during the Production stage.

Overview

Brainstorming Part 1

This first mind map takes various options into consideration, while we were pretty set on doing something light hearted and appealing, we did still take into consideration more serious options. We also definitely looked back on the examples shown to us during the briefing, as well as revised over the definition of what a documentary is meant to be. We also listed several target audiences before deciding which will be the most suitable one to aim this animation at.

Part 2

Part 2 gets a little more specific, once we all agreed on a particular style of animation, we started listing out various ideas that can be presented in such a tone and would actually fit a set of key words that we threw together (Eg, cute, pretty, fun, etc.). At the same time, we all listed a bunch of visual references we could refer to when we commence developing the concepts for our animation.

Part 3

We finally decided to go with an animation centring around various desserts, aside from of course being visually appealing, we felt that it would be an enjoyable and interesting subject matter to research into (We are most definitely sure that this would be of interest to our target audience as well). Considering the short duration for this animation, we had to narrow it down to European desserts, but because of that, we considered the idea of this becoming a potential series (Desserts from around the world, and maybe in breakfast, lunch and dinner might be included) in the future.

I will be putting together some visual mood boards (From the examples listed in the third mind map) over the weekend to share with my teammates. I will also be picking ten european desserts to share with them, and from there we will pick out some of the more interesting ones to focus on for this animation. If I still have time before then, maybe I will try to sketch out some concepts if possible.