Week 1 - Open minds

Week one of the new module and there have been some complications with forming all the groups but as it stands, my group consists of Anna, Amy and Bev. As our first group presentation is to be as soon as the following Monday, I figured that it was important that we get communicating as soon as possible, which is a little difficult since Anna, Bev and myself are all part-time and have different commitments.

I therefore decided to set up a group blog/message on facebook, so we can all share our thoughts as well as research, work, videos, links and content etc. I've used it before to work with others and it has proven very effective - you receive a personal notification when ever the blog is updated.

Unfortunately Anna had to leave this week to see family in Cyprus and wasn't able to attend the meeting we had on Friday, she also won't be here for our presentation either and is returning on Tuesday.

Although the group blog has proven effective so far and we have been able to share thoughts and ideas, it's perhaps not as effective or as progressive as holding an actual group meeting, but does provide food for thought. In our meeting we were able to have a more reflective conversation and properly discuss the topics in our blog.

Blog topics

The main issue has been deciding whether to work from an existing proposal/script or to create a new narrative for the animation exercises listed in the brief. Both Anna and Amy have suggested working from a script as they thought it would be a more interesting exercise. Anna had suggested doing a documentary on a conspiracy theory on climate engineering, with the intention of possibly entering the BBC's creative climate competition with it. 

However, in our meeting on Friday, it became a group concern that there isn't yet a script to work from and so developing a new script for a documentary would require a lot of research and development, which might possibly jeopardise time management for making the animation. Anna had also said that she didn't want to be overly ambitious for the sake of time management, and in light of this, in our meeting we agreed that it would have perhaps been easier to pursue Anna's idea if she had already developed it into a proposal during our time off.

Since Amy is the only one of us that did the script writing module,  she shared her animatics with us on the blog despite feeling that they weren't strong enough. During our meeting we agreed that her bee animatic was probably the strongest but we weren't sure about using if we wouldn't have users rights to the music she used for it.

As nothing had been decided yet, I thought it would be worth making a start on gathering visual references, similar to the 50 images exercise in the taxonomies module. Except I hoped to gather images that reflect our individual tastes in aesthetics, rather than our thought process. These images could be anything from sourcing characters we like, pallets of colours or textures, scenes that set moods, themes or a time of day. This was proposed as a way of keeping things open minded and loose since we're not sure which we'll be working on yet.