Documentary - Week 3 - Taking the Interview and Background Experiments

Interview

I spent a day trying to test and figure out the ways I can record an internet call. Conveniently enough, it turns out Skype now has such a function built in and the test call to my friend in Bangladesh gave me a decent quality recording. I gave her father a couple of days to think about what he wanted to say and collected any questions the rest of our team had that we were interested in knowing, and then I conducted the interview.

Being fully aware that we were doing a roughly one to two minute animation, the uncle gave me about 45 minutes worth of interview material. In Bangla. English is my first language but I know enough Bangla to get by, however not too much that I fully understand a conversation about a war, though I got the main gist of it.

I translated and transcripted what I could of the first ten minutes of the interview (tagging the parts I'd need help with) and made an excerpt of it to put in the preproduction presentation.

The next step is to translate the whole interview so I can sit down with the team and we can pick out the parts to keep for the animation. I'll be using the help of a friend to get this done before Monday.

I will also need to have a written consent form at some point to cover my bases - at the start of the interview I explained in Bangla once again what my interviewee's voice would be used for and he once again gave me consent, but for me to have this on paper I will likely need to send something via email to my friend so she can translate it for her father and send it back to me with a digital signature.

Background Tests

In preparation for the preproduction presentation, I also made some tester backgrounds to experiment with a style we wanted to go for, which is to have the backgrounds paint themselves up. I did this using the frame animation mode in Photoshop and making a new layer every time I made a new stroke. I think it looks good, but it results in needing over a hundred layers for the more complex backgrounds.

Watercolour brushes and blending

Oil brushes and blending

Crayon brush, blending, and outlines

If I'm honest I'm leaning more towards the watercolours just because it's more typical of the art that comes out of Bangladesh, but I also like this style of the picture staying in the middle and not touching the edges.

Feedback from Preproduction Presentation:

• Generally looks good so far
• It would be a shame to cut down the interview - Consider making an extended trailer instead of a self contained heavily cut down animation
• Background styles - look at Funan
• Idea of backgrounds painting themselves up is good
• Consider using coloured pencils and then scan in for use in backgrounds