How to write an abstract
Motivation: why care about question and results
Question statement: what is project trying to do?
Approach: how did you go about solving or making progress on this question
What were the key learnings of this project?
What results? What are the implications of this answer?
There are many resources produced overseas to address
emotional development but none native to New Zealand. This project seeks to fill a niche in how we
as a country think about emotions and react to stress. According to the Campaign for Action on
Family Violence, from 2009 to 2012 an average of 32 men, women, and children
were killed each year as a result of family violence; about half of homicides
in NZ are committed by an offender who is identified as family. The children’s animation project “Girl and
the Imagination Warehouse” has been developed with the intention of attracting
funding and producing a pilot and then a series to assist children 8-12 problem
solve and identify feelings. A human
character, Girl, explores the turbulent feelings associated with adolescence
with the help of her imaginary friends; these animals are the personification
of human stress responses and are portrayed in such a way as to physically
represent their characteristics in a fun and engaging way that will appeal to
children and adults. Various
methodologies have been considered when developing the look of the show
including 2D and 3D animation, puppetry, and live-action filming. The emphasis has been on developing a package
that will appeal to funding authorities, stakeholders, and creative
collaborators; a “pitch bible” with concept art, character bios, and stories
has been assembled, toy tie-ins have been created to prove the profitability of
the project, and music has been commissioned and recorded to bring the “voice”
of the show to life. The biggest key
learning of the project has been???? As
a result????
The key question I've been labouring under- what does it have to do with my project? This is not how I describe my project to other people. Why do I have to use it in my dissertation?
How
does the personification of emotional states in the animation of Girl’s
imaginary friends address the need to engage children and adults with difficult
topics?
Now I'm trying to write out what my intention was, what decisions I've made, and the results I've gotten in an attempt to reverse engineer a key question.
8 years ago I started to develop a children’s tv show that focused on anger management and
conflict resolution. I created 15 characters and narrowed them down to a core group of 7: a human girl, a Goldie the hamster, Flash the rabbit, Dr. Picklesniffer the dog, Prickles the puffer fish, Coco the crocodile, and Jellybean the armadillo. Each animal was chosen based on its correlation with human stress responses. The hamster binge-eats, the rabbit runs away, the dog, a Chihuahua, shakes, the puffer fish "blows up" and is covered with spikes, the crocodile snaps with its powerful jaws, and the armadillo rolls into a ball. I intended to use puppets, live actors, and filmmaking techniques to create
the show.
For my third year project, I needed to incorporate
the animation tools that I’d been learning at SIT and to bring together a
mascot filmed against a green screen with 2D and 3D animated techniques. I wanted to push the look of the characters and create an aesthetic separate from the typical "muppety" look I had used as my original inspiration. The puppets would have been made from foam and fur with large, spherical eyes and hand operated mouths. I desired to push the look of the show into richer and visually symbolic territory. Inspired by the stop-motion film "Toys in the Attic" (2009), I looked for ways to incorporate found objects with their silhouettes and to make their outsides translate their inner lives to the viewer. This exciting new character direction inspired me to consider the life of the project after graduation and to explore avenues for making the show in reality. As the show is created by an immigrant but is situated in New Zealand, I looked at native animals and considered which of the pre-existing characters could be switched out. Hamster and crocodile became Goldie the possum and Teppy the tuatara, an exciting development because some people had felt that the armadillo was "unrelatable" to New Zealand children. These new character designs would bring New Zealand and Australia closer to the project and the ubiquity of rabbits and dogs would balance out the exotic nature of the armadillo and puffer fish.
As time went on and the concept art developed, I decided that using a mascot for the character Jellybean was unnecessary. I was being constrained by my desire to bring
together old career priorities with new techniques. Ditching that constraint freed me up to put more mental energy into the 3D environment I was building for the Imagination Warehouse. The junk that comprises the characters didn't come from thin air, it was a reaction to the IW which is symbolic of the mind. A large space full of strange objects and nooks and crannies to explore would provide an endless variety of playing spaces for the show and meet my personal requirement that the show be accessible by children and adults. The child may miss the significance of a binge-eating possum made out of pasta or a runaway rabbit being made out of computer detritus but an adult wouldn't. The photo collage’ technique I was using to
render the characters in Photoshop had the tactile feel of the materials that I
would have used to create the characters as puppets. I have always been drawn to photo collage' and love the bridge that it creates visually between what is seen and what the brain knows can be touched. It makes the 2-dimensional picture 3-dimensional and the flat object volumetric.
I normally associate children's tv with a young audience and thought about aiming it at 4-8 year olds. As I presented ideas and characters as part of project presentations, I began to get feedback from tutors that suggested a better audience for the "edgy" ideas I was talking about might be tweens 8-12. This age group is looking forward to growing up and all the freedom and fear that being a teenager and an adult implies. To use an American example, 13 year olds read "Seventeen" magazine and 17 year olds read "Mademoiselle"; everybody seems to be looking forward to what's coming next. In light of this, I recognize that tweens on the older edge of the spectrum may not like this show but the younger ones will. It will also free me up to write in a more sophisticated way.
Just as the animal characters went through some changes, so did the human. She went from having a name, Klohwii, that was a piss-take of people who give their kids complicated names, to having no name, to having the name "Girl". I had a preconceived notion of who Klohwii was and what her parents and life were like and I didn't want that for my new child character. She should have a fresh start, a clean slate. Everybody has ideas about what characteristics go with what names and "Girl" does not suffer from any of those pre-judgments. I couldn't name her "Elle" or "Ella", French for girl, because those are popular names. As the majority of the action takes place in her imagination, it can be argued that "Girl" is what she calls herself since only her imaginary friends will be calling her anything. Out in the real world where the episode starts, she could have a real name that is up to the imagination of the viewer to produce.
A major priority, a definite NEED, for the project was music. I had written lyrics and had a basic tune for 3-4 songs. I wanted to find a collaborator who would be able to turn those lyrics into a full composition that could be used as incidental music (underneath the scene) or as the focus of the scene. I count Jim Henson's work with Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and The Storyteller series as one of the earliest influences on my career and aesthetic. Music has always gone hand-in-hand with the images of those shows and I wanted the same original sound to accompany the visuals of my show. I approached Doug? and Sally Bodkin-Allen, tutors in audio and music at SIT, for ideas about musicians in their department who might be interested in collaborating. Sally's first thought was Anna van Riel, a former student who sings and writes songs from her home base in Wanaka. I listened to her work, children's and adult, at her website and loved what I heard. I crafted a proposal using my pitch bible and the offer of a trade of skills. She got back to me right away and was keen to collaborate. I had long been a fan of the very funny group Wackids; they use toy instruments to cover hard rock songs. Anna said that she uses ukelele as a basis for her songs and wasn't the person to work with if I wanted a hard rock beat. I told her that that was the place I was starting from and sent her the lyrics I'd written for the project in the past. I'd written a basic theme for the show, a song for Girl called "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know", and a song for four characters to sing called "Today's the Day". From there, Anna asked me to sing them into a phone recorder and send it to her so she'd know what I was thinking of for music. She took the lyrics I had, added more and composed music for it. The "raw" recordings of the tracks were wonderful! I was so excited to have a song that I had once thought was a "throw away" turn into something even better than I could have imagined. It's hard to describe music with words. The new theme song for the show is called "The Imagination Warehouse". It lays out the premise of the show and that Girl goes into her imagination to work through her problems with her imaginary friends. It what I'd call a mournful sound and takes Girl and her concerns very seriously, just like I want the kids watching the show to feel. "Today's the Day" has a bluegrass beat and features performances by the possum, rabbit, armadillo, and Girl. Anna as me to come up with lyrics for more songs which she turned into music for the possum, the rabbit, and the armadillo to be sung by Girl. My collaboration with Anna has brought a greater to richness to the characters and inspired new ideas about how I might animate them in future. We went into the studio for three days and recorded four songs with three singers. Libby ? is Goldie who is now sounds like Judy Garland on the verge of a nervous breakdown (but without the pills) and Liv McBride sing/speaks Flash- just the way I'd always heard him in my head.
1. Tiny text technique
This is based on Dr. Inger Mewburn's Thesis Whisperer "tiny text" technique.
https://www.slideshare.net/ingermewburn/write-that-journal-article-in-7-days-12742195
Write 4 sentences:
1- Aim, eg. "This paper explores..."
2- Main argument, eg. "This paper argues that..."
3- Method, e.g. "The study was conducted..."
4- What's new? "This paper contributes to the debates on..."
PEELL on writing powerful paragraphs
P: Point: make one. Put it on the very first sentence.
E: Expand or Explain the point made.
E: Evidence, refer us to, to support your claim.
L: Link your information to the mainn topic you're discussing.
L: Link it to the next paragraph to create flow for the reader.
Come in Tuesday to present 3-minute Thesis in class.
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