The Pansy Project
Team: Project completed with Holly Watts, Hannah Wells and Ben Charman
The Challenge
Taking a piece of text, create a motion graphic sequence that compliments, enhances or subverts the content. As a starting point using one of these themes: Health + Well-Being, Social Issues, Climate Crisis, The Natural World.
Our chosen text
To start off we decided we wanted to present the social issue of homophobic abuse by analysing The Pansy Project website and show people what they do. We felt it was something that needed presenting to people with less censorship than in the media, to educate people and bring more awareness to the abuse that goes unnoticed.
Looking at the website we found that they plant a pansy in the location of where homophobic abuse occurred and document it on a map to highlight reality of the experiences that often go unreported. We found that the website only really uses documentary type content, with very little visuals, there was a gap to give the website a narrative in which to show people what they do.
The reason for planting pansies is that a living plant continues to grow unlike the ones placed at roadside memorials. It’s a gesture of quiet resistance. This action memorialises and highlights the incident, turns a place of hate and hurt into one of love and remedy. Pansies can withstand harsh elements using its defence mechanism by drooping its head, this resembles someone deep in thought. The word pansy is a corruption of the French word penser, to think and an offensive term directed towards gay men.
Initial experimentation
To understand the basics of animation and how it works we created flip books using simple drawings. This helped in being able to understand how each frame works together to make realistic, lifelike movement. The scratching on film workshop also helped in understanding this concept, looking at how you need to use at least 4 frames of the same content for it to be comprehendible to the eye.
Storyboarding
When starting to storyboard we wanted it to show people the homophobic abuse happening and how it relates to the planting of the pansy. As well as that we wanted our animation to present how frequently this abuse actually occurs so to do this we thought to include the pansy’s locations and statistics. First, we storyboarded separately to come up with multiple ideas and then came together and combined these ideas into one initial storyboard. I had the idea to use photos of the pansies planted at the locations however instead thought it would be better to show it in a different way than what they already do, by illustrating the pansy with different iconic buildings. I also though we should put the pansy in different weathers to display how it can withstand and live through harsh conditions. The initial storyboard went through other slight adaptations to create something that would flow smoothly.
Final storyboard
We made sure we included a strong call to action at the end of our animation so that people are encouraged to make a change and give a positive outlook to the animation. Knowing our plan for the final storyboard, Ben drew it in the style we wanted our animation to be in. This then meant I could start illustrating elements for my scenes and it would match the style of the rest of the animation.
Style development
Ben illustrated the characters for our animation, this included the main character which was the victim, extra characters who come together to stand up against the abuse and then the other characters which represent the abusers. We thought the main character worked well as it doesn't have the stereotypes of a girl or boy so shows the abuse can happen to anyone and the animation reaches a wider audience and is more inclusive. We then each based our illustrations for our scenes on the style ben used. With the abuser characters we found they weren't scary enough, so they were adapted to be more angular. We wanted to keep the colour minimal so we chose 4 vibrant colours (red, blue, orange and green) which we could use to highlight main elements in a scene and use for the 4 abusers. Later we added purple to our colour scheme as we were suggested to because its a colour in the non-binary flag, which further supports the representation.
Script and animatic
We wrote a script following the storyboard and using statistics we found from research. It also included information about what the pansy project does and a call to action in order to get people to make a change. Hannah got her friend to record the voice over for the animation, meaning we couple do a couple takes to make sure the tone of voice was correct. Using this we put together an animatic using our storyboard, this allowed us to figure out timing and how the animation would flow. From this we each then had a plan for what our section should look like meaning they would all fit together nicely.
Using After Effects
I attended many After Effect workshops so I was able to create the animation to the best of my ability. I leant the basics of using the software and if there was anything specific I wanted to with my animation I did further research to find out how to do it. We split the storyboard into section and I animated from 00:28 to 00:47. When it came to animating my section I used the illustrations I did and followed tutorials to implement techniques that would be effective.