My partner for this project is Xinyue Wang. https://myblog.arts.ac.uk/members/21014048/blogs/
To begin the process of making the 60 second animation for our client, we did the following:
We made a padlet board so we can easily share ideas with one another.
https://padlet.com/xwang04202131/umxnasr1fiunjud0
At the time I’m writing this blog post, we are currently focusing more on the flow of our storyboard and the audio rather than the artstyle we would want the animation to have. Even so, we have begun the process of collecting references we find interesting and visually appealing. I also added several examples of how black people can be illustrated and stylised in effective and exciting ways. Knowing what not to do when drawing black people is helpful to avoid creating depictions that can cause harm.
We then went through and listened to the 55 minute recording of anonymous testimonies provided to us from men who were affected by prostate cancer and sketched whatever came to mind while listening.
These initial sketches and storyboards can be seen below:
The content above has been ditched because of a multitude of reasons including:
We opted to not use the audio that went with these boards since we need to be selective about what we include in the clip.
We felt that some of the boards that were first sketched here out may not fit the tone of the subject matter in the best way. (e.g.: there’s a possibility that some of these initial boards may be too light hearted)
In order to improve, we will consult our client as much as possible during the meetings coming in the future.
After doing these initial sketches, we made several iterations of the final audio that we would be animating to by selecting sections that we thought were most relevant.
From this we ended up with two different 60 second audio tracks, one focusing on these topics:
• Importance of prostate cancer awareness
• Early diagnosis leads to better outcomes
• Self-care – importance of looking after your health
• Fear of and myths about cancer
The general structure we came up with for the audio was ‘introducing the topic at hand and the myths surrounding it (cancer)’ >>> ‘how these myths are not true and how it is important to speak about it more’>>> ‘encouragement to get help and support to recover’
Early diagnosis is best, but we felt it was important to also include the fact that people should seek treatment even if they feel like they are in the later stages of cancer.
The following images are the new boards (made by Xinyue) created after audio edits were made (we will be showing these as well as the ditched boards to our client the next time they come in to speak with us, just so they are familiar with everything we have created so far):