Responsive Collaboration: Making a Start

In our last Responsive session, we made a start at finding collaboration partners who were interested in the same competition briefs. There were only two people who was interested in the A2 Milk Company brief, and they seemed to be nice people who had a similar work ethic.

Unfortunately one of the group members has decided against the brief and has found a new group that is more suitable for her, so now we have a group of two. Which is fine.

Today I met up with my partner and we discussed the brief further. My initial idea coming into this particular brief would be to create an info-graphic style animation, not only because I thought this would meet the brief's requirements, but it is also something I had wanted to experiment with. Having researched into the company's past advertisements we found that they had already produced an info-graphic and thought it would be best to do something new and different. I pointed out that I was looking for an idea that was quite simple and wouldn't require too much intricate animating, especially as there was only two of us and we both have other deadlines to meet. We both agreed would be a good idea.

A2 Milk Infographic - A Year In Numbers

What is A2 Milk?

We constructed further research into what A2 Milk was so we could then better inform an audience with our own work. We found that the cows are NOT genetically modified to produce the milk without A1 proteins, and is in fact all natural.

We then brainstormed ideas on how we could make the animation appealing to the target audience (Women with children, and those with a perceived milk intolerance) and how the story-line could help do this, yet still be informative. We opted to base the story on Jack and the Beanstalk, but twist it so that Jack receives an A2 Milk Cow from the top of the beanstalk rather than a golden egg/goose. We thought by portraying the information in the form of a story this would appeal to mothers with children, but also be visually pleasing and entertaining to reach out to those who just don't agree with regular milk.

We also discussed what style we wanted the animation to be in, and decided that paper cutting was a nice idea. Having not done much of this before I was up for experimenting with it, especially as I would like to take a break from digital. By making characters into paper puppets we thought this might be easier on the both of us, especially as my partner doesn't have much experience with animation. Though, we will have to experiment with how we are going to get them to stand up-right, but we could always lay the paper flat as an alternative.

The script and story line was also discussed, and at the moment we have a rough idea of how it is going to go. This will be refined at a later date so we can test the length of the animation to make sure it is suitable, and from there we shall be able to make up storyboards.

Our next steps would be to begin designing. Because my partner is currently specializing in character design, I was more than happy to allow him to take control of that. I am going to tackle set design, and designing some of the props and we are going to report back with our progress next Friday.

I'm really pleased with our progress so far, and I'm happy that we both have similar ideas about what we want to do. I'm also happy that my partner is interested in trying out animation, as this means there will be less stress on me to complete it on my own. There's still the question of how compatible we are in terms of style, but I have seen some of his past work - which I actually am really fond of - and I think it wouldn't be too hard to adjust if needed, especially as the medium is going to be the same, and we are in charge of different elements. We will be able to find out for certain when we do some paper tests in one of our next sessions.