Major Blog Post 13- Animated Documentary

Posted on by Wendy Kong

Animated documentary is a combo of animation and documentary. It is widely used for teaching and giving social guidance. It can also create an imaginary situations or incidents happened in a subconscious level.

I like the “Animated minds” by Andy Glynne in 2003, it shows us how mental illness patients feel in their life. I think this is very educational since it visualizes the situation that the patients are suffering, and my reflection of the film would be we should show more care and love to them. I think people started seeing mental illnesses as serious issues in this decade, which makes me think that, it is possible that this video and other visualizing materials raised the consciousness of mental illness to the population. People will see the patients are not just “crazy”, but they are struggling with the stuff in their mind. Through the film, people can experience of facing mental health issues, which gives them a better understanding the problems rather than labelling and blaming them. This is a really good example of animated documentary educates the audience.

As the technology become more and more advanced, CG, complex scene background, and fancy costumes can make some impossible scenes possible, which leads animated documentary less common. In the 20th century, animated documentary was the technique to make the difficult scenes possible, this was one of an important stage for the documentary history.

Wendy Kong

Project02: Cut-out Animation| W.I.P. 1 | Inspiration and Hot Chocolate

Posted on by Sammy Liu

To start off our idea, we looked at some of our favourite concepts and vibes.
We decided to dive right in with a Deep Ocean concept, the protagonist being a girl with some typical Disney scenery and ‘magical girls’ vibes like in Bee and PuppyCat.

We used platforms like Pinterest and Instagram as well as They Drew as They Pleased – Volume Four Concept Art Book for inspiration and to create our desired mood-board for our scenery and character.

Having found a relaxed setting in a lush cafe near SCAD (:9) We brainstormed for our own possible scenes, actions, storyboard and character designs, accompanied by a sick spot of hot choco.

This is our very first rough sketch of a potential storyboard: Where it starts off with our protagonist’s point of view > cutting into a scene where she is sinking into the DEEP.

Project01: Object Animation | Documentation 2 | Production

Posted on by Sammy Liu

On the day of the shoot, it was boiling hot and extremely sunny.


Sammy: “I’m sure we got 3 shades darker after this, but the lighting was pretty and we initially wanted a natural environment.
We hit some problems with setting the tripod and getting a stable camera position at the first location of the shoot, so we had to decide to move else where.”

Wendy: “I think problem solving skills is definitely what we needed during the production process. We imagined lots of silly things that the food can do such as the using ketchup to do the explosion of the volcano.
We asked for only 3 little bags of ketchup from McDonald’s, but it was not enough at all. We wanted to pinch some holes on the package and squeeze it to make the explosion. It was just not working out as we imagined and our hands are full of ketchup. 🥫🥫🥫
What we can do better next time is to do a rehearsal before the acting shooting, so we can encounter and prepare for the problem we might have.”

Please check out our short “behind-the-scenes” clip we made for fun!

Wendy Kong

Claudia Lau

Sammy Liu