Term 3: Weeks 1 and 2 – Pitch

Welcome back to the blog! Today, I’ll be discussing the first two weeks of Term 3 of the CSM MA Character Animation course, which is all about the London International Animation Festival and a pitch that I prepared for it.

During the easter holidays, we were told to come up with an idea for a short 45 second sting for one of 8 categories for the LIAF later in the year. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll be aware I did a lot of research for Animated Documentaries, and seeing as it was a category, I felt obligated to pitch for it. Talking with my mentor, Paul Nicholson, gave me the idea to cover something personal – my social anxiety – and try to explain what it feels like in 45 seconds.

For those who aren’t aware, social anxiety is a mental health disorder where a person is frightened of social situations out of fear of judgment (being embarrassed, criticised, negatively viewed etc.). It often stems from a lack of self-confidence, and changes how we see and interact with people, taking a “worse-case scenario” stance. I’ll leave a link to the NHS which goes into more depth about the symptoms and causes.

I came up with a logline to define my intent with the project: In this animation, I aim to express the fragility and sensitivity of the human mind, through a short interaction where social anxiety reflects the feelings a person.

As someone who has social anxiety, I wanted to design the protagonist to be a reflection of me. Awkward, nervous, cautious, closed body language, these were the kind of qualities I wanted to reflect in the design, to show a fearfulness to the rest of the world. In the end, I settled on the right design, Dom, who is based on a 15-year-old version of me (and is named Dom as in an alternate universe, I would’ve been called Dominic). I also mixed in some overdramatic poses as to really highlight his insecurities and jumpyness in a panic. Overall, I like the design, and its pretty faithful to my dress sense back in 2012/13.

I considered how best to represent a mental health disorder when has no physical form, and decided to play with the idea of shadows. As such, social anxiety in this pitch would take the form of Dom’s shadow, that reflects Dom’s thoughts, his fears after a social situation and the personification of worse-case-scenario. It starts off generic, like a cartoon evil villain, before it reflects itself into whoever he’s spoken to as well as a rough version of himself. Whilst I didn’t make anything physical for the pitch, I proposed the idea of animating this shadow using “destructive animation”. It’s a technique where you draw or paint over the previous cel in order to create a new cel, which would give a very different feeling than traditional frame-by-frame. It’s often seen when using acrylic on glass, such as in the Mob Psycho ending below:

The synopsis of the story is that one day, Dom was waiting in a high street. He’d be asked by a stranger about directions to a library or similar, and would panic and fumble an answer. As the stranger walks off, his social anxiety would kick in, and berate him for his inability to confidently respond. The general location of the animation would have been on a high street, based on some I live nearby. Since it would have been 45 seconds long, I would have kept it to this one location, and alternate with with hues of dark blue, representing the inner subconscious of Dom. I made a bunch of style frames as seen below.

Having pitched it for the “Being Human” category after finding it didn’t feel as suited to Animated Documentary as I thought it had, the pitch wasn’t selected. Honestly, I think it’s better this way, as I’ve had a few more ideas about this that would extend beyond the 45 second run time. For now, this project of Reflection will be shelved until my grad film next year, where hopefully I’ll be able to do it justice. I imagine I’ll continue to do research, maybe create an animatic along the way, but for now, I’ll be putting the project to one side.

For the next term, I’ll be working under someone else’s direction (not sure as to who yet, the groups haven’t been assigned as of this post). We also got briefed today on the second project that forms Unit 2 with this LIAF, which is “Reflections on Reality” (I can’t help but think my project could technically fit with this theme). We’re working with another course (Performance I believe) who will come up with a story based on a key word, and we will create a 45 second animation after summer on this key word. This would be a perfect project, but alas, I’m saving it for the grand finale.