1920 Assignment Pre-Production

Pre-Production 

Semester two for our group project was to work together with the Ulster University in Belfast and choose a creative, historical subject to create an educational animation and to help it come to life for the audience. There were many interesting subjects and the two that stood out the most to me was “Bad Bridget” and the “1920’s”.

I was interested in both of these subjects and the brief description we had gotten on them both, stood out to me as empowering to woman subjects and something that I would enjoy the most, as a person who identifies as a woman and has been recently getting into feminist rights and activism.

(Bad Bridget Project, 1938-1918)

Bad Bridget was interesting to me as again I enjoyed that all the choices we had for the assignment were about those in Ireland and Northern Ireland and how Bad Bridget was about women from Ireland who immigrated to America and the exhibition was following the women who made this move, representing their stories and why they are remembered in history.

I just thought telling the story of a Bad Bridget and showing how they grew up in Ireland, the decision that lead them to immigrate to America and how they were independent in making that move, what they did what they were there and how choices which they made to help them where they wanted to go both positive or bad, showed that they were determined and deserve a spot in history.

(1924 tunic day dresses)

The 1920’s project was again about the woman of Ireland and Northern Ireland, but was less about the history of the woman and their mark that they made in history and was more about the costumes which they wore during that time. The dresses in the exhibition were more for the more fashionable ladies and was what they wore when they were going out to attend events and parties. I loved how passionate the curator talked about this exhibition and how all the dresses were connected directly to woman in Ireland/Belfast and represented a time in their life.

In the end I had gotten to choose the 1920 subject and was then taking the time to brainstorm with my group and do a bit more research into the 1920’s era. We were to focus on the fashion of the women in the 1920’s, their history and heritage. So we then developed this to understand the rest of what makes up the well-known 1920’s, such as the Great Gatsby, the post war revolution and the rise of woman’s rights with the suffragettes. I had known that the 20s was a popular time for many people and was just after the first world war, so was a time everyone wanted a break from the serious trauma of the last few years and to take their time back to party and enjoy their lives once again.

(Actress Betty Field dances the Charleston during a movie party scene)

(GETTY IMAGES)

This time in history seemed like such a fun and happy time for all involved and who got to dress up and enjoy themselves at these grand parties and get together. After death and war being so much of their lives and for so long, it was nice being able to breathe again and enjoy the freedom. That’s why the 1920’s exhibition intrigued me as it was also a very positive time for woman’s rights and the rise of the famous suffragettes. It would be nice to show the Belfast woman who owned these dresses and other interested in the history, how the dresses could come to life and not be just as they view on the mannequin.

My group included myself, Emma, Hannah, Rachel, and Ana and once we were all put into our group, we decided to brainstorm what we might do next for our group project. We had the prompt to do a final set up and 3D animation in unreal, but what we used to fill out the unreal scene and to create our animations was entirely up to us. We were able to make a start in discussing with the head of the project from the Ulster museum and was told information about how their research team had collected the 1920, authentic dresses from the woman of Belfast personally and explained to us how they wanted to showcase the dresses, to provide their background and history on why they wore these garments, how they got to own them and just how their lives where personally during the 1920’s.

This is when from our initial idea we decided to start our animation in the Ulster museums 1920 exhibition itself and to then fade into the dresses and allow them to come to life in a Great Gatsby environment. To further develop our animation and filming in Unreal Engine, I pitched the idea of maybe incorporating a continuous narrative into the beginning of the scene to give some introductory information into who owned the dresses and to perhaps use female voices to really give the audience a personal touch with the narration, as if they were being told the story by the woman themselves about their dresses.

(1920 woman, Belfast Telegraph)

The next stage of our plan was to then schedule a meeting with the curator herself and to have prepared some questions before hand, we wanted to gather some more information on her ideas when creating the 1920 exhibition, her desires for what our animation could bring to the exhibit and overall sit down with her to gather some more details that may help us encourage this Ulster museum animation to be more authentic.

I had personally prepared a list of questions that I thought would help us as a group as well as provide myself with some understanding of what we needed and would be best to include in our animation. I asked questions about the curators own desires and interest in the 1920’s era and why she decided to personalise it to Belfast. I asked questions about the dresses themselves and what other accessories she had gathered, and if she was able to provide us some nice images to help us in the design process of our animation. I believe we also pitched our rough idea to the curator and from what we gathered, she had seemed interested and agreed with our proposal to combine the exhibition itself and to then develop this more into a flash-back, fantasy reconstitution of a roaring 20’s Great Gatsby party.

These were questions I had wrote down myself that I thought would be helpful to know before we started to agree on what we were going to do for our final animation and before searching reference art and creating art of our own. I thought it would provide us the best information to start our project and allow us to work with David Tosh from the Ulster museum, along with the exhibitions curator.

(Questions-Marie)

The curator and the informative meeting provided our group with our questions answered, an acceptance of our idea to showcase the exhibition and we also got loads of helpful advice and reference images to help us to recreate a strong sense of the decade and in creating both a 1920’s party atmosphere and the Ulster museum setting itself.

The next step now after our groups initial planning and gathering of references and information, was to now cement our final idea through a group meeting and to create a plan along with tallying out the roles that everyone will need to fulfil and complete for their part of the final animation, as a team.

(2D Drawing- Marie)

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8535eb_0849f102474c40e393d6243c635d0fa6/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

(2D Animation- Marie)

These included are some rough ideas I had about filming and what dresses stood out the most for me, to focus on for this project and I had used the images we were given by the curator from the meeting, to do a rough animation of how I would move the camera around the Ulster museum scene in unreal.