Images & a video clip to better explain my idea.

"Who's ALAN?" (working title)

After watching Johnathan Hodge's Night Club I thought i'd like to make a similar film. A 2D animation of a rave club night to try and capture/reinterpret contemporary culture. 

These parties have outrageous decor - bright, huge, OTT.
The party goers have outrageous costumes - bright shirts, Kigus, animal hoods, anything they want.
The lights are colourful and bright.
The music is loud and bass heavy.
The dancefloors are packed full of people doing all sorts of dances. No one dances the same and anyone can dance how they want without being judged.

I also want to look at the Rave scene and it's culture from another angle. In the past whenever they try to describe acid and other drugs in film and animation, everything seems to go very bright and start melting, I'm thinking Yellow Submarine psychedelic trips. 

I want to explore this from a more realistic point of view. I want the film to be from the view point someone at the rave who has taken acid. 
Although the film will be quite trippy in style, the realism will be there in the sense, the user doesn't go into another world. Things happen though.

Styles & Scenes

Everything needs to be growing and shrinking constantly.
A lot of dark figures with no features to represent the crowds.
POV film of the user walking around the club.
Scenes of people dancing/skanking.
People morphing into animals
2 people changing from people to rats to people to rats, gurning in the dark.
Going to the bathroom - an escape from the scene. 
Bleeding walls (due to spray paint)
Throwing up in the toilet
The lights overcoming the user
Talking to people who speak words (literal words)
Faces coming out of the crowd, shouting, smiling.
Nos balloons - heads growing and shrinking with the balloon.

These are still simple ideas but I think I need to get a loose storyboard and get some film footage in order to make a start at it.

I think in the modern era, these are my favourite topics of discussion and favourite medias to use to try and create new ideas/experiments in how people work.
Maybe I should be studying Anthropology or Psychology. I love the extension of ourselves in the digital world. It's like we have Us, then the professional us, then this digital us.
We can be anyone online, though it worries me that we don't believe we can be anyone in the real world. But we can say/do/be anything and so can everyone else. It's up to us to wade through the lies to find the truth if we choose to.

Anyway. The point is, i'd like to study character some more. And the way i'd make this character is by finding someone I know, but don't. We all have people on these sites who we know, say we take a class with, or met at a party once. We are "Facebook Friends" but not real friends. 
I'd like to take one of these people and make them my character, just from information on their sites that they give away for free. Use their photos to set scenes in their lives, read their status' to get an idea of what they enjoy. I'd love to see how accurate or ridiculous we could make it.

I want to post this up to explain a bit about who Cara Yeates is and why we use her name in my work.
When we started the Codes & Conventions project at uni, no one wanted to work with me (probably because I'm yet to prove myself as an animator). So when discussing the groups on Facebook, I said I was with Cara & Sarah. It went from there. Of course these girls are not real, but I wanted to see how far I could take the joke, I wanted to see if I could create them.
Here is a copy of the final brief & analysis of the project. It is written as a letter because due to unforseen circumstances, some people were offended and thought that her character was to made to bully/take the piss. It was never meant to be taken that way.
Codes and conventions:

A study into identity and Facebook culture.

Conventions and codes control us, everyday we live up to some sort of standard that is excepted of us. We call it "being ourselves". 
But who are we really? 
When I'm with my parents, I am not the same as I am around my friends, when I am walking down the street, I act differently to how I act when I am at home. We've always adapted ourselves to our surroundings for security and safety.

Facebook and the Internet, has allowed for a further persona to develop. The online persona, where we can be anything and anyone, talk to and interact with many people in multiple ways. We publicly open ourselves up to the world, but not to those who are there for us in real time.

We build relationships, friendships, feelings for people we've never met, never interacted with outside of the digital domain. We let people into our lives, tell them our deepest secrets, yet will never really know them, and we hide these from the REAL people in our lives.

Ben Wingrove is massively interested in identity and Facebook culture and has been for some time. His distrust is public knowledge, his mother has worried that by being outspoken of his mistrust, he could be endangering himself. That is why he dislikes any information of the REAL him being broadcast.

This brief project, which was not meant to be anything, comes from a study of interactive theatre and seeing how far he can push things. 

Ben wanted to explore the idea that everyday people are living their online personas. Many people are perfectly happy to build relationships online with people they've never met and to trust what these people tell them. Ben wanted to see what could happen if these two worlds combined.

By creating two characters, and putting them into a scenario where he had the ability to monitor it, he wanted to see if these characters could live through the "participants" of the project, both those in the know and those not, he could take them from the safety of their online persona and make them come to life.

With time and planning, whole scenes could be acted out, friendship, arguments, love, heartbreak, even death. These characters could become friends, could become part of something. Can we remove the screen through which we view entertainment? Is breaking the 4th wall to this degree too much? 

The issue of morality comes into play, when we ask "is it a lie?" "is it art?" "is it theatre?" Ben calls it pushing interactivity in art, these sort of projects/plays/stories could replace television due to how easy they are to set up and how far they can go. The project raises questions about forced participation in art, does knowing you are involved change the experience, does knowing make it more or less real? By being involved but not knowing it, you become part of the art, and by knowing you become part of the performance. 

The project raises all sorts of questions, this has just been one outcome of many possible endings. 

Ben meant no offense or discomfort and apologises for any upset that may have arisen from this experiment but only because the quality of the project didn't merit the reaction. Had he planned it better this could have been something much more fun for everyone which is what it was meant to be, a bit of fun.

You may not hear from me again, but I hope that I have made you think and that I remain with you in some way.

Cara Yeates x

I wanted to have googly eyes on it, but then i thought they'd fall off and it would take ages. Anyway this is pretty cool, I think i'd enjoy being given this haha!
I'm not sure what to put on it though, so i imagine that i'll have been talking to whoever I give it to and they'll know what i'm about.

So I've been avoiding the 21st century the last few weeks and keeping away from technology. Which has been nice. It's been good to think about other things.
But now I'm back and have a million things to do and write about.

Live Briefs:
The video game is coming along really well actually. You can follow the progress HERE. Hopefully we will have a working demo soon.

I am also working on something quite hush hush for someone. If I pull it off it will be really good. More on that as it emerges.

I've been thinking about my Final Major Project lately, as I know I have to present an idea for it soon. I have written up some loose plans for it. I think it's going to be inspired heavily by Jonathan Hodgson's 'Nightclub'. A 2d hand drawn project. very vague and quite dark. I want it to reflect more modern clubbing experiences, experiences I have had.
I also want to break the convention of "acid trip" animation where everything is surreal and trippy and reflect a more realistic acid trip.