Okay - so cancer is perhaps the most ambitious scenario in terms of storytelling, as not only do you have to explain the cell-cycle, you also may need to deal with the treatment of cancer and the destruction of the cancer cells, or risk ending your animation with a message that cancer is unstoppable and/or terminal etc. As there is an educative remit for your animation - and the audience is young people whose lives might already be touched by cancer in someway - I wonder if you have a responsibility to ensure cancer is not misrepresented as an unstoppable killer?
In terms of your provisional art direction, I was most drawn to the idea of those geometric shapes representing the various 'players' in the story of cell division and cancer; it steers you away completely from the 'blobs with faces' approach and ends up being more abstracted, even diagrammatic in an exciting and fresh way: for example:
https://vimeo.com/181644714 https://vimeo.com/23642044 https://vimeo.com/123939463 https://vimeo.com/112208320 (I'm not talking about the monkey in this one!)
Those thumbnails remind me of those great molecule models too:
The thing about this more 'diagrammatic' approach is that it distances us a bit from the 'body horror' element of cancer and lets us just think about the nuts and bolts of what's going on and why without getting into the 'decay/disgust/death' mode.
The other issue with personifying cancer as a 'crab' for example is that it suggests that the cancer cell becomes somehow 'different' to the cells around it - which it is - but not 'different species' different. The advice I've given other students too is not to mix up different sorts of biologies into a biological scenario, as audiences might take the metaphor literally or come to expect that cancer cells have claws etc. A crab metaphor would work only if the whole story-universe was set underwater, where good cells were crabs, and cancer cells were evil crabs.
As I said, there's something more dynamic-seeming about the total abstraction implied by your cone and cube thumbnails - it seems very promising to me.
OGR 16/03/17
ReplyDeleteHey Anabel,
Okay - so cancer is perhaps the most ambitious scenario in terms of storytelling, as not only do you have to explain the cell-cycle, you also may need to deal with the treatment of cancer and the destruction of the cancer cells, or risk ending your animation with a message that cancer is unstoppable and/or terminal etc. As there is an educative remit for your animation - and the audience is young people whose lives might already be touched by cancer in someway - I wonder if you have a responsibility to ensure cancer is not misrepresented as an unstoppable killer?
In terms of your provisional art direction, I was most drawn to the idea of those geometric shapes representing the various 'players' in the story of cell division and cancer; it steers you away completely from the 'blobs with faces' approach and ends up being more abstracted, even diagrammatic in an exciting and fresh way: for example:
https://vimeo.com/181644714
https://vimeo.com/23642044
https://vimeo.com/123939463
https://vimeo.com/112208320 (I'm not talking about the monkey in this one!)
Those thumbnails remind me of those great molecule models too:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.teachersource.com/images/products/pop/moly.jpg
https://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/5829237/il_fullxfull.199183150.jpg
The thing about this more 'diagrammatic' approach is that it distances us a bit from the 'body horror' element of cancer and lets us just think about the nuts and bolts of what's going on and why without getting into the 'decay/disgust/death' mode.
The other issue with personifying cancer as a 'crab' for example is that it suggests that the cancer cell becomes somehow 'different' to the cells around it - which it is - but not 'different species' different. The advice I've given other students too is not to mix up different sorts of biologies into a biological scenario, as audiences might take the metaphor literally or come to expect that cancer cells have claws etc. A crab metaphor would work only if the whole story-universe was set underwater, where good cells were crabs, and cancer cells were evil crabs.
As I said, there's something more dynamic-seeming about the total abstraction implied by your cone and cube thumbnails - it seems very promising to me.
Thanks for the response!
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