[COP3]Weekly update

This week has been super busy. I gave out 2.5 days to work on the lifting tower brief and have been ill for 2 days as well... Although I achieve this week's target, my practical work of COP still not going well as plan. I really struggle finding the most suitable practical. Considering the time and workload, I do not want to make it too complicated but at the same time hoping the practical could include as much information as it can.
Here are the concept:

Considering that audience needs to have a story behind in order to understand the relationship between the object and the human, I created a story based on a boy who is lonely, only have a football as a company. The football is with him everyday but one day the boy is invited by other people so he put down the football and never look back. I found give the story some sad element is the easiest way to gain empathy and people would feel sorry for the football. However Mike suggested not to use the ball and using something that is easier to raise attention from audience like hoover which has more similarity to human than a football.

 At first, I was not sure about what Mike said. I do not personality think the object would matter since the focus is not on the object's physical property but what it is representing. So I did not think much about what else I could do, I went with the hoover idea.

I decided to use three situation to describe how the hoover could represent the human character. Henry the hoover for normal family, high-tech hoover for the rich people and very old type of hoover for elderly.

Here are some tests

However I stopped. I found out that it is not I want to do. The practical did not demonstrate well enough how an object could generate empathy and make audience feel for it. It focus too much on how the supporting character (in this case the human) could help to express but neglect that the object is the main character of the story. The simple 5 seconds action would not do the job to create anthropomorphism and I should have thought about it in greater details of  what I really want to show to people what I have learnt from the research.

So I looked at Chris Luk who is an ex-student in Leeds College of Art, he did similar practical as my topic where he did three anthropomorphic character test that demonstrate the difference between different techniques. Then I thought, OK I could do something similar. However, thinking about how I am also including inanimate object that is not animated... I started being confused how I could do a test comparing the rest since it should be a fair test and audience have to see clear differences between all three topics. I was planning to make a short story for the still object but that goes back to where I started...which is a dead end

After a week of frustration. I talked to Tony again. He is always good in advise. I told him my situation and he said I should not worry too much about what Mike said about using human-like objects, I should create whatever I feel suitable for the topic. Not because his idea is not relevant, but I should be clearer than him where my practical is going. Tony also suggest me to think outside the box. Do not trapped with the physical property of the object as it could be anything that without life. So I thought about household objects, rubbish in the sea, air particles, something that could become a story due to the cycle of nature, something that is not human- determined. How could I still use objects to tell stories even without the human character? what create the movement? and what happened? I think there is a lot more to consider. Although tomorrow we have to hand in the research board, I do not want to rush my idea because of that. So I will use Sunday to think about it once again and start pitching storyboards. Considering with the time, being optimistic, still 4.5 weeks I could do my practical before I go back so I need to be more confident about the practical!