The Boy Mir by Phil Grabsky (director) Lecture - Notes

• "When Channel 4 first started they were just looking for independent producers" - now it is a lot harder to get noticed

• Important to understand your market

• Need an economic and business brain

• Put 50% effort in production of a film / 50% effort in the business and marketing of a film

• 'Waterfall of distribution' - festivals, cinema, TV, DVD

• Be realistic

• Series' build up audience loyalty

• When you make a documentary, it's not your story - you are never sure of what will happen next

• Help inform people to come to decisions

• The audience wants to be entertained

• It's all about telling the story - although at first you may not be sure what the story is

• A documentary film will have an impact on the participants lives - you owe them a responsibility

• You can never target everyone

• Humour and entertainment are important

Creating My Basic Character Using After Effects

Aside from The Hand, all of the characters that I plan to us in my animation will be very simple 2D vector characters. This is so that they can be developed and given more detail by The Hand.

Using Adobe Illustrator I created a basic line drawing of the sort of character I would like to use, with each part of it on separate layers. I then imported this into Adobe After Effects to animate. 

I also plan to use a white background in my animation so that it can also be developed and given more detail by the things that The Hand introduces.

Because each part of  my character was drawn onto its own layers in Adobe Illustrator, I was able to move the anchor points of each and use character rigging.

I was able to use key points to animate my character, and enable multiple actions to take place at once.

This was the end result of my basic character animation process:

"Why Read If I Want To Make Stuff?" by Joanna Callighan (director) Lecture - Notes

• Deconstruction - re-reading something in a new way

• Think about what you have already done and what you can learn from it

• The questions about the answers:

- What do I want to find out?

- Why do I want to find this out?

- Who am I to ask these questions?

Inspiration from the Work of Others

Once I had come up with my basic idea, I remembered a piece of animation that I had previously studied that I feel is relevant to my idea.

The Hand by Jiri Trnka Ruka is a piece of stop motion animation from 1965.

Although I plan to use 2D vector based computer animation combined with video, rather than stop motion, I feel that this existing piece of animation uses similar themes to those which I would like to use. 
I also really like the power that the hand in this animation has, and he way it interacts with the character.

Initial Ideas