Week 1

In our first class, we had to get into groups of three, (although one had four) and analyse a paragraph from "Teddy Bear Picnic" to see how it could be interpreted differently in the present day. This was the passage we had to analyse.

"Beneath the trees, where nobody sees, 

they hide and seek as long as they please, 

'cause that's the way the teddy bears have their picnic."

I was working with Nathan Iseppi and Edden Yemini. We noticed "secrecy" was a major theme in that passage and so used it as the center of the mind map we created.

Some of the ideas we came up with were:

• An underground lair
• Hiding from society
• A mini ogre society, ogre complex - wanting to avoid society
• Hobo communities
• Illegal refugees - for example, Mexicans illegally entering the USA
• Scary creatures such as goblins, gremlins
• Underground crimes like what's done by gangsters and mafia, slum life as shown in films like "Slumdog Millionaire" and "City of God"
• Rave party
• Guerella warfare
• "You don't want to know what they eat at their picnic"
• You don't have any right to interfere with their culture and lifestyles
• The "teddy bears" could be souls or spirits that are free to do what they want and their physical bodies could have less control of their lives,
• The "outsiders" don't want to go alone
• The "woods" could be the afterlife.

Of the above listed themes, we were most drawn to the "Big Brother is watching everyone" idea and government conspiracy idea. People generally dislike invasion of their privacy and some proof of that is people have responded negatively to the Street view and Satellite view on Google Maps.

We thought it would be interesting to imagine a world where a lot of surveillance was much more accepted by people. We had the idea of people treating a camera as if it were a companion or pet such as eating with it, playing with it, taking it to friends houses and the cinemas, etc. We also imagined there could be toy dogs, some sort of object that had a mini camera inside or anthropomorphic cameras. The cameras are being used by a surveyor or surveyors in a surveillance room.

An idea we had for a scene was to show a point of view shot from the camera inside one of the objects. Then the camera view would zoom out to show a surveillance monitor and then zoom out even further to show a big surveillance room with lots of cameras. Our teacher said our idea was similar to Panopticon, an institution where it is possible for a single watchman to observe all the inmates without them ever being aware if they're currently being watched or not.

Later that day, we pitched our idea to the class as did the other groups. It was well received although one person found it difficult to envision the dark concept alongside the cuteness of the toys with cameras inside of them.

In relation to the passage, we felt that the line, "Beneath the trees" could symbolize the overcrowdedness of the world and all the cameras. The line, "they hide and seek" could represent the "hidden" cameras which are "seeking" the things in the world. The line, "have their picnic" could simply represent people's every day lives.

The next day, Elisa attempted to merge the different groups ideas into one story. As a class, we discussed our thoughts on it using the Six Thinking Hats method by Edward de Bono.

These are the results we came up with as a class.

Overall, it was too complicated and needed to be simplified. We also discussed how much we wanted to be involved and which roles we wanted to be assigned to. However, these were not to be permanent decisions, just simply what we felt we wanted to do for that moment. I decided to be only partly involved as I felt that I should keep myself open to other project throughout the class with other people or solo projects. I chose to be involved in making the storyboards and animatic and editing the finished film because I enjoy those tasks. Since 3D modelling is my specialisation, I figured that I would also naturally be involved with the 3D modelling in the project but I decided to wait and keep myself open.