Peter McVerry Talk

Peter McVerry Talk

On Tuesday 3rd of October, we welcomed a guest speaker from the Peter McVerry Trust. The speaker began by introducing the Trust the mission of the trust and its history that is spread over the last few decades. She highlighted the Trust’s aims and goals for the next few years and even had the strange business strategy to go out of business, something that would only be achievable by ending homelessness in Ireland. The speaker emphasized the goals of the Trust they hoped to achieve for the homeless in Ireland, some of which were building houses for the homeless or those in bad situations.

In terms of the animations, she spoke of need for the animations to represent the Trust’s message pf hope and highlighted several key aspects the animation should show;

- Positive; don’t focus on the negative
- Respect for the person
- Use of Imagery
- Stereotypes; challenge people’s perception of homelessness.

Original Story Idea and Why It May Not Work;

In the beginning, I found a short animated series online known as '1Minute Nature' that used digital animation on top of cut-out backgrounds and images of real environments that where scaled up compared to the characters. I wanted to try cut-out animation with a small blend of manipulation animation in the background of the short. The simple outline of the story was to have the character in a kitchen environment while real people in the back went about setting the table. The character would sit on a mug while in the background people would place cutlery on the table. The character would jump down and indicate that the mug was similar to the cell he slept in for a number of years while in hostels. As he would describe the house he now owns, the people in the background would place down everyday objects that would represent the areas he describes. The character would then move behind one of this objects and the scene would transition to a scale model of a sitting room or kitchen where he would sit and say he can final have a cup of tea in his own house.

I changed my initial idea due to the fact that when I looked at my idea in a bit more in-depth, I found that I felt I was making the character seem small compared to the individuals in the background and thusly making him appear less important and denying him a sense of respect for his story.

Now I am planning out an idea involving a text based animation with respective imagery for the scene. The short will mostly comprise of quick moving scenes and transition from one angle to another so that the animation is not just one straight line.