Animation Addressing Bullying

We were asked us to do research into the Loeries and then to complete and construct a brief that fits into one of the categories of the Loeries to help develop us as competing creative producers.

I decided that I wanted to create an animation for my Loeries submission because I hope to incorporate it into my main set of future skills. Instead of focusing on a brand as usual I decided to rather base my brief around a social issue which my animation can then create awareness around and desirably upliftment towards the situation. Through research I found that bullying in schools was a major social issue within my country as well as around the world so this is what I decided to aim my animations concept towards. I researched further into bullying and discovered that it all stems down to something called social constructivism. This is the idea that people only know and live by the collective knowledge and influence of the people and society around them. This concept began to drive my idea for the animation giving me insight to how I will construct a narrative based around this understanding. After this my research led me to a film called Pleasantville. The film depicted people being stuck in a black and white version of reality where there is set norms and routines to their life until two outside perspectives show these people that there is more to life beyond what they think and know, there is a greater understanding. This ultimately became my driving force conceptually. I wanted to show people that we can be limited by what we are taught and see of other people and above all that respect and acceptance for others needs to be actively instilled from a young age because based on the concept of Social constructivism and the movie Pleasantville we see that people are influenced socially and because of this it can also limit further personal discovery into how and how not to live life. if it is not instilled then those people truly will never be influenced to respect others it will just be assumed that they know. This ultimately will influence society as a whole, working like a chain reaction and keeping a number of the younger generations minds limited to what they are not taught, and so some act out as bullies without full understanding for respect for others and of this concept.

I began animating with my characters with separate limbs assigning code to each image making a full person. I found this to be far too difficult and then drew inspiration from a show called South Park where all the characters hop around as a form of walking. I found that much less time consuming and actually liked the style and look of the animation with this technique of walking a lot better. I made use of simple clean illustrations and took inspiration from a drawing style from the Instagram page called Made by Radio, I liked this style of drawing and went forward with it in mind. I wanted to create my animation with the same kind of quirky and modern atmosphere as they do and their fluid character motions.

Originally, I had thought to use colour as a key signifier in my animation to help drive my message. The Pleasantville film is strongly based around using colour on only key objects in the film and so it helped develop my concept and give me insight to what I should colour and what I should not for the audience to grasp my message clearly. So, I made the entire animation black and white with only relevant objects and or people in colour who represent or symbolise the message I am bringing forward through my creative solution. I Illustrated images and backgrounds in illustrator and then imported them into after affects where I applied a black and white effect to each image. Since it is an animation about bullying I created a narrative based around a child’s first day at school. I felt this would work well to help convey my message because on the first day of school you only know what your parents have taught you. School is also a place filled with many influences and teachings. Among other scenes I depicted a cafeteria scene as the main are of conflict in the narrative which I knew all members of the audience would identify with because we all had to deal with where to sit as a kid in school and the different clicks. This would drive the fact that there are already sets of “norms” that kids begin learning. This is where I mainly made use of colour because it is where most of my character’s development and conflict takes place and where my meaning is essentially brought through which is ultimately that respecting others should become a norm and be instilled in society, especially from a young age.

The first animation I created was much longer and had more explanatory and insightful scenes however due to technique issues so I had to create a much more simplified version with the time I

had left.