Responsive Session 9

It was my fault that I had not written a clearer description for my peers to understand (I really was intending to make these boards as clear and straight forward as possible, though I suppose what I ended up putting in was insufficient), many of them seemed to think that Anna and I were intending to make an animation, instead of a set of boards that would show various visual concepts that could pass of as screenshots for an animation.

Research Board

While I researched into various examples of illustrations, animations and infographics of various mediums (That would overall aid us in developing our own style for this project), Anna got down to the nitty gritty and helped dissect the WWF's report and extracted information that was interesting and important enough to catch the attention of the audience, and especially folks who have a short attention span like I do.

During an earlier meet up with her, we then looked through her notes and picked out points that particularly stood out to us, from there we then started sketching out our own concepts, which lead to:

Sketch Concept Board

It was a pleasant surprise to see that we had very similar ideas, so sharing our ideas and seeing what worked proved to be a pretty straight forward and smooth process, it didn't take too long either when it came to figuring out what else we could do to improve these concepts before we actually started executing them.

Visual Concept Board

And so once again with "Food Rules" being our main source of inspiration, I quickly put together some really quick visual concepts based on the sketches we did, and created some digital mock ups that could resemble paper cut out and other objects (For example, with the overfishing concept, the idea of using fish crackers only came after I had made the mockup), as well as experimented to see what would be the best surface to use for the entirety of the concept. For the final product, we will most definitely stick to more traditional means, and make these textures and such from scratch.

And so this is the feedback we got by the end of the session, despite there being a slight misunderstanding, I do believe that we got a pretty positive response from most of them:

As for the slightly more negative (Or just critical, there is nothing too negative really) responses, I am not at all deterred by this and am actually quite confident in the direction we are going in, I have however definitely taken into consideration more obvious suggestions, such as adding in some text as well as some basic animations (It will definitely be wiser than attempting to throw out a 2 minute animation in such a short period of time) to strengthen this concept of ours for the WWF brief.

As mentioned before, there was a bit of slight misunderstanding, most of our peers seemed unsure over whether our chosen art and animation style will actually appeal to the brief's audience, and while we definitely have taken their opinions into consideration, we still feel that we will actually be able to create something appealingly unique (You might even say that the style we are going for is... down to earth, aaayyyyye) with our chosen style. I do believe that a tiny bit of humour would help with the overall concept (Which we will try to apply to the script later on), but other than that, we have no desire to use a style that is apparently meant to appeal to the "Always On" audience. The good thing is that none of them believed that our direction was too cliche.

While we have decided to go with the board submissions, as mentioned earlier, we are also thinking of doing some very basic animations to give a clearer view of our concept, that we will be submitting as supporting items alongside our boards.

Our next course of action:

1. Further dissect notes to draft a little script
2. Get concepts done as well as list down what materials we need
3. Gather together craft materials
4. Begin creating visual concepts and basic animations!