At this point I have written a treatment of my animation. Some things might still change but I think it’s a pretty final general outline of the story.

Additionally, I attended a lecture from a Holocaust survivor yesterday. It was particularly interesting and relevant to me due to the child perspective of his story and also the focus on emotional aspects as he was too young at the time to understand the politics and such. He also spoke briefly about his work in educating people about the Holocaust and I found it very interesting that he said that he had to make a small joke now and then and tell his story quite lightheartedly, despite the pain he still feels, to keep an audience and to convey it in an emotionally manageable way (for him and his audience). I think this is something I can keep in mind with my work.

In terms of my actual work, one thing I’m struggling with is a title but this will come in time and it could really be one of the last things I do. Another struggle, or concern, I have is that with using animals I’m not sure exactly how much I want to incorporate human things. By this I mean there is a train in the story and a house; these kind of have to be included but do the animals wear clothes? Or use guns? There are really three ways of incorporating human objects with anthropomorphism: 1) animals are aware of human things but they are human things and humans exist and use them e.g. Watership Down, 101 Dalmations; 2) Humans don’t exist but things still do and in this case are created and used by the animals in place of people, including everything from vehicles to houses to clothes e.g. My Little Pony, Disney’s Robin Hood; 3) Humans exist with their things but animals have their own equivalents or have adapted human things into their own, particularly with clothes/accessories/etc. e.g. Chicken Run, Aristocats.

I think the best for mine would be the second choice. I think this is the most easily relatable option for children and also I don’t really want humans to exist at all within the universe of my animation – consider it really as an ‘alternate’ history where the same thing happened but with animals, as with Robin Hood which also, basically, retells a historical story just with animals in place of people.

So far I have decided on 2D animation over 3D due to time scale and my ability but will continue to look into 3D animation on the side. I also have the general plot of my animation (based roughly on the true story that I mentioned before). I have decided to stick with the concentration camp story, I know that I will have to be careful in telling the story meaningfully and avoiding being offensive, but I think I can do it with this story which as I said is more about the emotional aspects of being liberated and the aftermath than the horrific experience of the camp. I have also decided definitely to tell this story using animals rather than humans. I think Disney are a great place to look for how to tell serious/dark narratives for children using animals, particularly where violence/death is concerned. Other notable examples are Animal Farm which I have mentioned a couple of times previously and Watership Down, some of which Richard Adams based on his war experience. Also, Adams said “I do not believe in talking down to children” when discussing the dark/gruesome images of the novel/animation which I think is an important standpoint to take with this kind of topic. Mine is a different kind of serious to these stories, but I think the way I envision telling it will still be appropriate, particularly in “empathetic understanding” that history education ‘develops and employs’ in children (Primary Curriculum – Teaching the Foundation Subjects, 65).

I have not started adapting this yet into my screenplay/storyboard yet but I will do very soon.

I started sketching some (very) basic character designs and exploring different drawing styles, narrowing down how I might like my animation to look – for example the Disney style of drawing would not be appropriate for this I feel as it is too ‘comic’ and ‘soft’. A style closer to that of Watership Down (the 1978 version) or Animal Farm would be more appropriate as it feels a little more serious in it’s ‘harder’ lines, closer realism and darker colour palette.

I have drawn the main characters as cows and a yak (only because of the name Yakov and to add some visual variety) mainly because in real life they were actually treated as ‘cattle’: “the SS herded us into open cattle cars”. I was also considering pigs, horses, other livestock/farm animals for secondary characters but I’m not certain.

For other characters (which I have not started drawing yet), I am looking towards historical and cultural (including pop culture) associations and tropes. For example I was thinking of animals such as wolves and German shepherds for the SS, perhaps bulldogs, horses, foxes, rabbits and so on for Allied troops.

I have also been considering ‘visual style’ a little. For example, I think I would like to use a ‘Yiddish-style’ font, probably for the title.
Maybe something like these:

The first thing I wanted to show was an app called pplkpr.

This is an app which, when used with their $99 wrist band, measures heart rate when speaking to people to determine how you feel when speaking to specific people and tells you whether to spend more time with them or cut them out of your life.

This is a prime example of how technology like this is getting to the point of the unnecessary and ridiculous. Heart rate monitoring in particular could have great potential applications but some developers seem to be a bit off track.

I don’t really have much else to say about that, so the second thing I showed was an organisation called e-Nable.

They use 3D printing to create free prosthetics for people, mainly children it seems, who can not afford them for whatever reason.

This is a really amazing use of 3D printing and the fact that it is an open source project and the families get the prosthetics free of charge instead of having to spend thousands on one through the healthcare makes this even better.
This is exactly what 3D printing should be doing for the world and it’s heartwarming and inspiring to see that a project like this does exist.

Semester B has begun now and to follow the liberation brief I want to tell an allegory of a historical ‘liberation’, possibly regarding the French Revolution or concentration camps though this is not definite.

James cautioned me on doing too recent history as it could become ‘inappropriate’ in many ways, but I did find a Dachau survivor account recently and I read an excerpt of it which had been published as an online article. I think this kind of story could be appropriate as it focused less on the horror of the camp and more on the emotional effects of being liberated (quite suddenly) as well as the post-escape struggles to survive; so I was thinking of perhaps basing my story loosely on this account.

I am definite that I want to create my story through animation, either 2D(/2.5D) or 3D, or perhaps some sort of mix between the two.

3D animation is an area I’m really interested in. I have never done any 3D animation (well, I’ve dabbled with modelling and such but I have negligible experience) but I have never really had the opportunity to. Now I do have that opportunity and I would like to seize it; however, we have limited time and I wouldn’t want my project to end up subpar which James pointed out was a serious possibility simply due to the fact that I would be learning as I go and don’t have too much time to do it.

So I’d be either expanding on and improving my 2D animation skills or developing brand new 3D animation skills. I’m not certain which path to follow just yet but I am leaning more towards 2D simply because I think I could produce a higher quality product.

Here is a link to my proposal.