This post marks the beginning of my first 2nd year project, Cats & dogs for the Horniman museum. For this project, there were two briefs to choose from; an NHS brief about breast cancer in black women, which often goes unchecked until it’s too late for a number of reasons, and a 40-50 second informative animation aimed toward kids and families about cats and dogs for the Horniman museum. Both of these briefs sounded interesting to me; as a black person myself I think it’s interesting to tackle issues within our community, and I also think it’s important to come up with digestible ways in which kids can digest information and learn. After some thought, I decided to go with the cats and dogs brief for a couple of reasons; My goal in life is to create animated series for children (older children and teens, although creating an animation for younger kids and families sounds like good practice), and I feel that working with the constraints of what is suitable and digestible for a younger audience will help me to shape my own ideas into ideas that children will enjoy watching. I also find that I have trouble with making my ideas clear and as understandable to others as they are to me, and I feel the constraints of this project will help me to think in a more objective and critical way about how I can clearly communicate ideas to an audience.

For this project we have to work in teams, and I’m working with two classmates called Calix & Leonardo. We got together as a team in class, and we were given a couple quick tasks to get our brains running; we had to quickly get down some ideas that we could possibly work with and build on, and then create a rough visual moodboard and present our idea to the class. It was helpful to share our ideas, as this would prevent us from creating animations that were too similar to other group ideas.

We started our process by looking at cats, with the idea of showing how cats have been perceived through history in different cultures and through different times, and how ideas differed; for example, ancient Egyptians favoured cats and worshipped them as gods, while in London they were seen as omens of bad luck and sometimes familiars of witches. I liked this idea a lot (I’m biased since I’m a cat owner myself), but after some discussion with other teams, we realised almost everybody had chosen cats and not dogs. We decided to change our idea, opting for an animation about dogs so that our work would stand out. We pretty much carried over the same idea, but included the element of jobs that dogs help us out with, such as police dogs and guide dogs. We created a rough mood board and presented it to our class for feedback;

We included some pictures of cartoon dogs who are popular amongst children, such as blue from blue’s clues and dugee, to give a rough indication of visual styles we could aim for (we all have relatively similar cartoony and simple art styles, so we knew it would probably end up looking more expressive and child like), as well as general dog images and some quick buzz words. My teammate Leonardo suggested that we present the dogs through a storybook, and my teacher liked the idea, as kids would be familiar with storybooks and it would offer us a way to quickly transition between dogs.

Overall I think this is a good start to our project, and I’m optimistic about it. As time goes on we’ll refine and polish our idea, but I think we have the basic framework for it down. I’m excited to see how our idea evolves and develops.