Researching into how the NHS delivers the awareness on the causes through their adverts, the one that comes to my mind a lot would be the Jack-In-The-Box advert as it presents the message in a visual metaphor for people could be feeling they might have cancer or not. The psychological metaphor would influence our decision to explore in visualising a person’s feelings and the thoughts they could be having in whilst isolated in a dark void for our film.As one of the few animators/artists that I has inspired me throughout my years so far, Howard Wimshurst’s approach and techniques to his animations is something that I admire due to how he executes them. Especially with his client work with T3Pharma, where he created an animation on how through cancer therapy treatments could impact the human body. I wanted to explore this idea in our advert, but the clients didn’t like the idea of visually showing any representation of the human body as it would make the advert too dark. Despite this alteration, I do find Howard’s approach in the making of his animation and the experience with his clients as a form of reference to how to handle feedback and meeting the clients’ demands.
Around the time when this project was starting out, I’ve watched a film called Evergalactic on Netflix. Not only has a style and mood that I wanted to include in our film in terms of location settings, visual expressions and culture, but it was the designs of the Black characters featured in the film that I took my attention. Of course, most of the characters are in their youth, however, as someone who needs a form of reference to represent Black people in a respectful way through character design, it has helped me learn on how to add this influence into the development of my art style and our film. The closer me and my partner got the the production stage of our animation at the end of the year, there was an animation that I came across called ‘Are You Okay?”, uploaded by YouTuber, Ockeroid. The animation itself is a personal one to him, but I did the overall aesthetic and use of boils to be visually moving. I took this as inspiration for how I depicted the dark mental void that our character is trapped in our film as for the most part, there were a lot of scenes where our character isn’t moving as much so I thought it would be best to include so our audience doesn’t get bored when viewing our film.
