Responsive: Collaborative Practice: Initial Ideas and Organising Interviews

Initial Ideas

After getting into a group of three with Jay and Molly, we brainstormed some initial ideas for how we wanted to tackle the brief. This consisted mostly of creating mind-maps, linking ideas for things we wished to explore, as well as creating a joint mood-board using images from Pinterest. Through creating these mood-boards we quickly found we all had a shared appreciation for the same types of illustrators and artists, which we used as inspiration, but different ways of going about interpreting our influences.

We read through the brief and brand guidelines provided by D&AD in order to better decide how we should approach the brief and decided after much discussion that we should approach this project, the way most charitable campaigns are conducted nowadays; with Social Media in mind. As this is the second stage of an existing campaign for raising awareness for adults with Autism, we decided that the format of our submission should reflect the contemporary media landscape in keeping with the times; short, sharable content; something you would see while scrolling down your timeline on Social Media.

This is where we got the idea to create a series of short animations, each one under the same broad stylistic convention, rather than a single piece of content, as this allows for the campaign to be about the message rather than the content of a single animation. By creating a series, the audience is more likely to connect to the underlying message rather than simply one animation or point of view. We also got the idea to make the short animations, short animated interviews with people who have had some sort of experience with Autism, whether it be themselves, friends or relatives.

We looked at examples of documentaries, both animated and live action, which use the interview format for inspiration as to how we should go about this. Namely...

Inner Views


Tough


Life Animated

Organising Interviews

Documentaries, by their very nature are dictated by their factual content, so in order to create one, you must first gather adaptable research material which can be interpreted visually in order to tell a story or make a point. As a group, after careful discussion, we decided that the content of our documentary should be a series of interviews we conduct ourselves with people who have experience with Autism. Many of the documentaries we admire, as well as the ones we have been analysing so far, could be described as animated monologues; edited interviews which paint a picture of a person or situation for the artist to interpret in the form of an animation.

In order to get the word out about our interviews, we put up posters around the college as well as on social media asking people to reach out and talk to us about their experiences, whether that be themselves,  friends or relatives. As the brief outlined, the phase of the campaign for which we will be creating the animations will be focused more on the experiences of adults, however we would also like to be more specific with this, focusing on the experiences of young women predominantly, as we all feel their experiences are severely underrepresented in the societal conversation revolving around Autism.