Responsive: Loopdeloop Chicken - Free Range Chicken

After not being satisfied with my first idea of chicken butt, I tried to develop the concept into something else. I thought of another context in which the chicken eating grains is actually just a picture on a chicken truck, and in the end it is just an irony of the term free range chicken. Sounds like an animation that a vegan will make. I quite like the idea although I am not all that crazy about the vegan trend or movement, although I do want to protect the environment. Nevertheless, to be able to come up with a satirical idea is quite a rare thing for me. And so, I decided to scrape off the initial chicken butt idea. 

My initial approach to develop the idea is to do thumbnail sketches of different types of trucks that carries chicken to big cities to be chopped up. The chickens were kept together in a very tight space, each one of them squished each other's body and it is impossible for them to move. From drawing up the trucks, I realised that the space was rectangular in shape, and I decided to use a shape-based aesthetic for the animation.

Studies of truck

I have learned about shape-based illustration by looking at some the work my illustrator friends produced for our collaborative practice animation. They always talked about what makes an illustration interesting being the balance in arrangement of shapes, colours and textures in the composition. The idea appeals to me for this animation because I want to keep my animation simple, and I don't want it to move as much, but at the same time I still want to make it look interesting. I sketched out different compositions of the chicken; shifting the shapes around the composition to make the chicken looks like it is cramped to the extent that it can't move anymore.

Cramping up chicken in a rectangular box

Final mock up illustration that I want to use for my animation:

Collaborative Practice: Week 3 - Experimentation on mixed media and story brainstorm

 I started to experiment by putting thin tissue paper onto my character doodles. It gives a nice texture and looks good as an overlay to the line drawings. I did this while trying to roughly find the right shape for king character as well. The bravado pose is definitely a thing to go for, but I am not really sure how to incorporate it into the character in cut-outs animation that we will be doing for the project. 

We discussed about the storyline this week, and also some other artist inspirations that we can use as a reference material to come up with the aesthetics. It was great talking to Alicja and Galuh because they are more knowledgeable in terms of stylistic-illustration than I do. Out of all the mixed media illustrator, Joanna Neborsky stood out the most for us. Her style are heavily influenced b y the mid 20-Centuries style, flat and heavily shape-based imagery. Some of her work reminds me of Saul Bass who does cut out title sequences for David Hitchcock's movies. They are flat and simple but effective, and the use of textures made her illustrations interesting. Neborsky's gravitates towards narrative-based artwork, and she did some animation work as well.

The one below is an animation that she made for a title sequence of a book. I think the aesthetic suits the cover of the book being advertised, and because of the composition and textures the minimal movement of the different objects suits the style. I think this should be something to keep in mind when animating so that we don't over-animate. 

UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR by Patrick deWitt (animation by Joanna Neborsky) from Joanna Neborsky on Vimeo.

We were thinking of combining different parts of human and animal bodies to make the characters. Here are something similar to what we are thinking of making:

Jan Svanknajer's Chicken

Bojack Horsem

For the following week, I have to storyboard the story that we have, while illustrators will design the characters.We decided to adapt Hans Christian Andersen's story the Emperor's New Clothes, and the narrative will be set in a kingdom when humans and animals live together in harmony. The first three seconds will start off with 'Once Upon a Time' on the screen and visual that can grasp the audience, and there will be an establishing shot of the kingdom. For this, we plan to use signs to cut down the work on details. The camera will then zooms into the king's dressing room in his palace, and shows the king is busy getting ready for the parade. There are two creepy looking guys (the swindlers) that suggest him what to wear, and he wore them. Then, the scene change to the crowd coming down to the town square to watch the parade and when the king arrives, all the animals shrieks and run away frightened by the king. I was thinking of trimming the audio from this video (1:36 to 1:41) because it just hit the right level of intensity that we are looking for.

The animation will end with an image of trimmed fur and our tagline with sound effect of hair trimming in the background.

On a side note, I found Commes Des Garscons Spring/Summer 2017 menswear catwalk adapting The Emperor's New Clothes story into their designs. The materials used for the design are quite interesting, the plastic material conveys the sense of 'invisibility' and the fact that the model wearing underwear symbolise an anti-fashion message. The use of calligraphy lettering on the plastic poncho also adds more to the anarchic feel of the catwalk. The choice of material and typography are some other important consideration to our animation because it will help enhance the aesthetic of the final outcome.

Documentary Animation: Week 3 - Primary Research: Trip to Knostrop

Last Thursday, we took a cheeky trip to Knostrop in South Leeds where the frack water from the whole UK was treated before its disposal. Knostrop was unsightly, but not as bad as the gutters back at home in Jakarta. Still, I think it is insightful to find out the dirty side of the UK being just around the corner of Leeds. The stench of the chemicals, still water and the trashes thrown away on the grass welcomed us as we walk towards Knostrop. The highlight is of course that one mattress lying around on the side of the road. (I did not took a picture of it though)

Art installation (?)

Rosie and Tom in front of Knostrop

Knostrop left me anxious about the environmental impact of any kind of industrial activities and it has set the mood for myself to make a documentary animation on sustainability. It is not that I am not aware of the climate change, it is just that it never got to slap me in the face until I have gotten the chance to experience it in reality.

A truck transporting some dangerous chemicals

Obviously, we can't come in

Ominous looking treatment plant

Disgusting trashes and debris in the muddy water

Big dangerous trucks transporting materials

Going to Knostrop was a good exposure of how industrial manufacturing catalyses environmental catastrophes. Despite not being able to draw for long on the spot because of the stench from the asphalt factory, we did took some pictures helps to document this primary research, although it could not capture the unpleasant smells.

Dirty Bus Stop

Documentary Animation: Week 3 - Storyboard, Animatic and Moodboard

Today, we decided to choose which story that we want to use in this project. I did a storyboard of the audio that I chose to develop last week, in which I tried to incorporate the beat of the sound in the storyboard. I made the storyboard based on what I imagined when I listened to the tracks, I thought playful images would suit the swanky music in the background. 

Storyboard Thumbnails

One thing that I enjoyed when making the storyboard is picking on materials that can be interestingly visualised to make the track more engaging to the audience. The rambly bits in the recording sort of puts me off because English isn't my first language, but I managed to write down a messily done script of Martin's water story. Just by listening to the track I can visualise the things that are verbally told, but I did gather reference images that helps me visualise things as I drew out the thumbnails, which I put on the moodboards later on. It helps me to These images helped a lot as a visual cues to what I want to sketch when I am having problem articulating what I had thought of.

This one is the things that stood out to me the most from the track, and probably something that have to appeal the most to the audience. Hence, I have to think through the visualisation of these things. They are the beat of the music from the background and the cows. The cows are interesting enough to be made as a comedic scene, probably something weird like cow's butt and tail wagging. It has a potential to engage the audience. I took note of how to visualise the beat of the music as well and stumbled upon some complex experimental music scores that is made as some sort of constructivist art. It is inspires me to play around with the silhouette of things; mostly rectangular shapes and straight lines to depict the fracking and drilling sites, which uses straight steel bars

Simply some compilation of fracking and coal seam gas (CSG) sites in Australia. I did incorporate some objects like pipes and the big steel boxes into the storyboard.

Hardest board to assemble! I had a difficulty visualising the end bit of the track when Martin talked about how water is precious and so forth. 'Precious' is intangible feeling and it is hard to depict it as an object. So, I took another approach which is to look at human interaction with water. Hopefully, by showing imagery of the small things that matter, it will help people realise how important water is for their survival. It is indeed cliched, but since Martin ended his story with a light-hearted tone the ending is best to be made positive.

After all of us finished storyboarding, we explained each of our storyboards to the group and we are contemplating between using Tom's and Rosie's tracks. Both have their own strong points but their connotation are a bit different. I thought Tom's storyboard looks good as a comic strip because of the visual style, it also works well with the track because David is a likeable character and he told his story in a comedic manner. Rosie's one is narrated by an 80-years-old woman, and we all agreed it is a stronger option because her voice sounds antique. The scope of the flood problem that she talked about in her story is more than just a mere stories of frog adapting to climate change and migrate away from their habitat. Aside of the narrative advantage, I love how Rosie thought of the smooth transitions she used in the storyboard. In the end, we decided to use the Fear of Water track that Rosie has storyboarded.

Tom, Rosie and I have agreed not to use mine in the end because there are clearer tracks that have the potential to be developed. However, I am even more convinced after putting the storyboard together as an animatic that the story told by Martin and the music does not go together, I think the music ruins the seriousness of the climate change issue he is talking about. It was such a downer because I really like the story that Martin told because it tells a lot about the pressing issue of climate change in a light-hearted manner.

Responsive: Loopdeloop Chicken - Initial Idea

For the third brief, I am unsure what to choose between 'Do It In 20' or Loopdeloop challenge. After several days weighing their pros and cons I decided that it is better for me to do loopdeloop because of the time constraint and all the big commitments that I have for other modules. 

The theme for this month's loopdeloop is Chicken, and the first idea that jumped into my mind when I thought about it was an animation of zooming into chicken's butt. I was planning to animate it according to the rhythm of a funny track that I found on freesound.org titled 'Down by the Cool of the Pool'. Combining the track with my idea of chicken animation is quite random, but I think it suits as a loopdeloop submission since it is quite a loosely-set brief.

I drew up some derpy chicken character as my chicken butt design, trying to twist chicken heads and also experimenting with different eye shapes. Well, I called it experiment, but I think there is nothing significant of a change. 

Initial Idea doodles

I tried out another approach on Photoshop by painting over a reference image of a chicken head from Google. I quite like the style, and it seems more derpy than all the chicken I have drawn so far. I might use this for my final design.

I have added a patterned background that I can animate to the beat of the track while zooming into the butthole, but I think I am overcomplicating things, which defeats the initial plan to make a snappy animation that does not require much time for me to get it done. I do not think I am hyped up to do an animation based on this idea anymore.

Collaborative Practice: Week 2 - Collage Research and Story Idea

My group has decided to use collage for our animation. We planned to do it together instead of just me by myself doing the animating. So, I proposed to them that we can do it by using stop motion which is a straightforward process. We think that the process of stop-motion will work better than animating the assets of After Effects because we can control the assets easily by hand, and ultimately have fun in the process. Stop-motion is a more spontaneous process as well, although it requires thorough preparation of the assets, changes on them can be done on the spot. It will be good exposure for my two other groupmates as they are keen to try doing stop-motion animation.

Story Ideas

I had a group discussion just with Galuh because Alicja went back to Poland for the hole interview week, we talked about the issue of fur trade and got an epiphany that it is closely related to Hans Christian Andersen's story The Emperor's New Clothes. We decided to go back to the story to remind ourselves what happens in between the start and the ending. From this discussion, I realised how important it is to make an impactful start and end because those will be the ones that will stick to our audience's head, and that's going to be how the story is going to be communicated by spoken words. 

 illustrated sequence of the story

I have broken down my analysis on the character's role in the narrative and contextualised them accordingly. The people who buy fur are symbolised by the king. The swindlers are the advertisers and the traders who give reasons for the consumers to buy fur for fashion, status and class. The general public are the other supporting characters who comes in between being confused or indifferent towards the issue in fur trade. They are mostly remote from the cruel reality because they have not seen them in real life or probably just pretend that fur trade is not doing these unethical practices, and we identified these people are our target audience because they are the most susceptible to be swayed by fashion advertisement.

We want to convey to fur buyers that snobbery and pursuit of status through buying fur are foolish. Hans Christian Andersen's story is widely used because of its straightforwardness to convey morals. Galuh and I also liked the idea of using fairy tale narrative format to mock glamour: fur buying being a vulgar statement against ethics. We want to sham fur buyers by juxtaposing fur fashion and fear from the animal's side.

Whenever I met up with my groupmates for discussion, we always exchanged knowledge. This time I showed Galuh and sent the link to Alicja this animation so that we can decide what we will do for out animation. They told me that we can do something colourful but with white background because we do not have the luxury of time. I think the animation My Dad Says could be used as a reference because it does not involve much filling up of the white space. Instead, most of the scenes are mainly bold coloured outlines that works effectively with the tone of voice the animation.

My Dad from Marcus Armitage on Vimeo.

Collage

The medium that we are going to use for our animation is collage. The basic principle of collage is to interact with existing materials; just rip up or cut out, then reassemble. A good collage material would be something that exists in our surroundings or some cheap old-school magazines to be taken out and placed with some materials. From this description, making collage sounds experimental and spontaneous. The most important thing is to get the right balance, so it is important to take note of collage as a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Hannah Hoch, who is a member of the Berlin Dada Movement, created collage which are intensely political and anti-war. Her works brought the radical potential of cut out materials from magazines and encyclopaedias which are re-appropriated and re-contextulised to protest against the war and the system.  The endlessness and potential to create ridiculous scenarios is characteristic of collage which is quite similar to animation, and so I think it is worth to give collage a go for this project because of its protest nature.

Sources

http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/3318/top-10-collage-artists-hannah-hoch-to-man-ray

http://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/nuno-ferreira-a-chronic-artist

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/cut-that-out-collage-book-dr-me-150816

Documentary Animation: Week 2 - Chat with Devi Lockwood and Choosing a Narrative

We decided to have a chat with Devi Lockwood, a poet and storyteller (she's such a sweetheart) who Rosie met when she went to the Frack Free Leeds meeting. Devi gave a short talk in the meeting about her journey travelling around the world to collect 1,001 stories about water and climate change, which so far she has gotten into 600 stories.

Check out Devi's blog. It is awesome!

https://onebikeoneyear.wordpress.com/author/carpediem883/

http://devi-lockwood.com/

We met her last Tuesday (7th Feb) for dinner, and ask questions about her life and why she got into the slow cycling and collecting stories. We were really lucky because she was about to leave Leeds the night we met her.

The idea of travelling to collect stories came when she slow cycled with her aunt for a few miles at lake Mississippi. She was studying at Harvard then. She mentioned that a year before she graduated, an Asian student got a grant from Harvard to do a project similar to hers after graduation. This motivated her to pursue the dream after graduation, and so she started applying for sponsorships to fund her travel. After getting rejections many times, she finally got a grant for this 1,001 stories project. 

She travelled by bike and plane until she got to New Zealand where a person told her about the carbon footprints produced by flying, and started to hop on cargo ships to travel to different places, instead of flying with planes. Devi got in touch with the cargo ship crew through e-mails, and then did some crowd funding and fundraising in order to collect money to get her into the cargo ships. 

In the middle of travelling to collect stories, she went to climate change activists meet ups and sometimes protests. One of her checkpoint is attending the COP22 in Moscow. She also happened to be in London and went to participate on The Woman's March. I am glad that we met her, she is such a cool person!

When we asked her about the stories that she collected, she had no idea about most of them since there are a lot of stories being told that it is hard for her to digest all the information by herself. Fortunately, she recorded all the stories told by different people with a microphone and made a list for all the recordings in a small yellow notebook which she bought after having felt overwhelmed by a lot of information. The notebook is well-kept and easy to read because of her neat handwriting and top-notch organisation skill. Our deal is that we wrote down the stories that we like (based on the captions that she wrote), and Devi would send their recordings to us once she got access to decent internet connection.

Those some of the main things that I could recall from our conversation with Devi. There is definitely more to our conversation, however I am too shy to playback the recorded conversation because it is cringe-y listening to my own voice, and not to mention my terribly loud laughs. YIKES!

Devi on her way to gather stories from people

On Saturday night, we finally got the sound recordings of the stories from Devi. I was in London at that time dealing with some nasty visa business, so I missed out some good stories. I did wrote down some of the recordings that stood out to me, which I downloaded later on and listened to on the train back to Leeds just this morning. Wrote down some notes and sketches for visualisation of the events described by the storytellers on a rough paper. Taped them up to my sketchbook because organisation skillz! woop! sorry in advance about the jarring blue tapes. 

Water in Dreams 

Mary, who Devi met Future Living festivals, recounts about interpretation of dreams about water to a person's emotional state. It is insightful, but lacking the depth of narrative we are looking for.

Notes from Water in Dreams

Dancing in the Rain

On Carla's 30th birthday, she was stuck on the airport due to fogging. She had a vivacious encounter when flying from Wellington to Sydney. The narration is in personal point of view, but it essentially delivers a message about climate change. After 4 months long of drought, it finally rained in Sydney. People are running out of their offices, people wearing suits were dancing under the rain, women threw away their high heels and danced in the gutter. It is a light-hearted story about human beings close-knitted relationship to water. Give a reason to why we have to mitigate the impact and the ongoing process of climate change.

Fear of Water

A  woman told a story about how, after 80 years, she discovered why she is terrified of water. She has recurring nightmare based on her childhood experience being rescued from a flood. I fell in love with this story on the first sight, I can see this having an outstanding potential to be developed as a narrative type documentary animation. The unique voice, the story, the lifelong journey of contemplation, on the whole it shouts authenticity! I am hopeful for this to be developed as our animation. If we decided not to use it now,  I would gladly make an animation based on it during my spare time.

Fracking

Recorded in a music festival, Marvin (or Martin) told a story about fracking. Yaay! Finally something similar to what we researched the whole week last week and an issue that is relevant locally in Leeds. He talked about water contamination caused by fracking of coals and gas mining. Drilling wells and inappropriate waste management causes flammable chemicals to be in water. Most importantly he highlighted that we, humans, are made out of water, stressing the importance of water in our daily life, and asserted why fracking should stop.

Sailor's story about climate change

It is a highly informative story. However, the sailor is quite a scientist, such that he focused on tying down facts to make a point rather than a story. It ended off with a note that, realistically, we are not capable of stopping climate change, but we could still mitigate the effect of climate change. I love this, but I could agree with Tom and Rosie that the facts makes it dry.

Coal Mines and Sugar Farms

This one is hard to listen to. The storyteller is definitely not a speaker. He stutters a lot, but after listening to it several times, I could appreciate his story. He spoke about a lot of aspects to climate change which are interesting. He voiced out his opinion on coal mining and sugar farming, whaling, and the long term effect of climate change. This recording offers a good quality content, but its disorganised structure makes it more like a jumbled up thoughts. It is least likely for us to animate this one but I think it is definitely an insightful story.

Melting of Glaciers

A story told by a person who works in Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand (couldn't catch his name because of his accent). The formation of Lake Tazman, which did not exist in the 70s but now is 7 km long, is formed by the melted ice from the glaciers. He also raised his concern about the worrying effect of climate change to the glaciers, such as creaking and groaning sound, falling off of the glaciers. The natural landscape is disappearing.

I can closely relate to this story because I remembered I went to Fox Glacier in New Zealand when I was 5. It was a breathtaking experience, and I am saddened that such beautiful landscape will perish if the effects of climate change persist.

Drawings of Glacier

10,000 Squashed Toads on the Highway and Bob Hope

David who used to live in Alabama told a story when he lived close to the third largest nuclear reactor in the world. The placement of streetlights and lights from cars passing through the highway attracted insects and toad frogs, which mostly ended up being run over by cars. However, David observed what used to be 10,000 frog carcasses has reduced to 3. The frog not populating the highway anymore shows that reptiles are more sensitive to ambient temperature changes than human.

The other story that he told was funny but also controversial critic on Ronald Reagan's governance. He gave an account of a disdain to Bob Hope, who lived in a pass just outside of palm springs California, and whose wife complained about the kinetic of wind turbines as a plight to the landscape and caused a lot of trouble for him when he was working as director of government relation for the wind energy association in the US. 

Paintings of glacier and a frog inhabiting a nuclear power plant

Group discussion today: which video do we like the most?

The three of us decided that the fracking story is the one we would like to work on. We like on how it touches on the message of how we can't live without water and brought into light the direct effect of fracking to the water we consume every day. However, we are concerned with the voice of the man and the voice of the band playing being equally loud. Tom had tried to separate the narration from the background music, but it is really difficult to do so. Some other recordings that we liked are the squashed toads, fear of water and dancing in the rain.

For next week, we will come up with a storyboard from one of the recordings that we chose. Rosie chose Fear of Water and Tom chose Squashed Toads and Bob Hope. Although I liked the story of dancing in the rain, I could not give up on the fracking story. It has potential to be a great animation, despite not being recorded properly. Also, we have spent last week researching on fracking, and I still want to stick to the topic as much as possible. The man's tone of voice is what we are looking for: emotional connection to water. What I might do is incorporate the sound and create a visual that amplifies the narration and is appropriate for the background sound.

Documentary Animation: Week 2 - Primary Research: Cuadrilla Protest

Some protest banners that we saw during our trip to Preston New Road. It is a permanent drill site owned by Cuadrilla located near Blackpool, where some frack-free activists come to protest against fracking. Although the banner is bright and bold, the message communicated is not really effective because they are too wordy which inspires me to make an animation to communicate the contra to fracking, so that hopefully fracking will stop and authorities are convinced to mine alternative energies that is eco-friendly. 

Collaborative Practice: Week 1 - Fur for Animals Preliminary Research

For collaborative practice, we are set to work in groups (AGAIN!) with graphic designers and illustrators to work on a brief either from D&AD or YCN. I chose to work with Galuh and Alicja who are both illustrators interested in doing a campaign for Fur for Animals. We had our first meeting in which we read the briefs together, watched some videos relevant to the briefs, and break down what we have to do and make mini deadlines to keep us in track since we do not have much time to spend on this project (Deadline is 22th of March! Damn...).

Dissecting the Brief

Fur for Animals want to appeal to fashion buyers, specifically from Russia and China who have the most affinity towards buying fur products. They are the ones who keeps the industry going. What is wrong with the fur industry? Unethical treatment towards animals, violence and caging are the most prominent issues. The industry are indifferent to the animals well-being, they only cared about the financial gains. I have seen a lot of publications questioning ethical practice in the industry. Some of them are quite graphic documentary especially the ones made by PETA, which a lot of people dismiss as 'taking it too far'. Fur for Animals brief are looking for a campaign that does not depict violence, but still serves its purpose to discourage people from buying furs. Some other requirements of the briefs: maximum 2 minutes long, 3 second windows must work without audio (probably for Facebook), appeal to international audience especially Russian and Chinese buyers.

Videos

We start off our research by watching 'Dumb Animals' as suggested by the brief. The narrative contrasts glamour and violence which are the two main contention of buying fur and ended with a tagline 'It takes 40 Dumb Animals to make a fur coat, and it only takes one to wear it.' We think that the provocative dark jokes is appropriate and appealing to mature audience. The transition glamour and awkwardly pretentious audience in a fashion show and the blood spurting scene contrasts the 'presumed' good and the bad pretty nicely. 

We watched some other videos to find out about the unethical treatment towards the animal and also a documentary that explains why people in Russia loves fur coat. These three following videos are the ones that introduces different viewpoints and got our discussion going:

1. Fur Farms

This video shows the animal cruelty happening in the farm, in which animals are caged in a really small cage, looking distressed, jumping around and continuously pacing. Makes me feel claustrophobic and wants to vomit. It is not so much of a graphic video, but the mental strain is so visible. It makes us understand how bad they treat the animals in the farm in contrast to free range livestocks, such as chickens, cows and sheep that roams around freely in the grass plains.

2. Fur Coats

The Russian buys fur for fashion trend and temperature. There is a silver lining between beauty and need here. We are aware that winter in Russia is horribly cold, normally around -40 degree celcius, there are many fatalities caused by the winter. They need the extra warmth which can be offered by a fur coat. Although there are many other types of alternative outerwears that can keep them warm, those who can afford fur coat are more likely to buy it because fur coat gives a timeless look. 'Fur never goes out of style.' Due to the close distance between the two countries, China might have similar winter to Russia. China's rapid economic growth might influence more consumption of fur from its middle class who wants to show off their prosperity especially since fur symbolises a status of the privileged.

3. A YouTube Star who Kills Animals for Fur

Other than the seller and buyer factors (industry), there are also cultural aspect in killing animals for fur. This guy from Canada lives to hunt. For the people who hunt like him, they often kill animals to keep traditions alive.

What do we want to work on?

We had considered some of the different viewpoints on killing animals for their fur, which makes us want to do the brief even more. As cliched as it seems, we shared the same point of view that we want to make a difference. Although we three are good at different things, we decided that we want to make an animation probably a minute long, in collage style. The idea of turning something funny into fucked might be what we are going for. We want to make the process as fun and less daunting as possible. For the next week, we planned to have our ideas ready and pitch it to in a group meeting. What I will do for next week is to come up with a story, researching the medium we are using and the narrowing down the context we want to focus on.

What is Literature for? from Marcus Armitage on Vimeo.

Documentary Animation : Week 1 - Planning and Research

For the Documentary Animation brief, I decided to team up with Tom Hallgarten and Rosie. We decided to do an animation about the issue of fracking in Lancashire. The issue is a serious one that angers many people from Lancashire. Cuadrilla, the fracking company which drills in Lancashire area, claimed that the Lancashire discovery could satisfy the UK's gas consumption 'for 56 years'. The UK government granted Cuadrilla a permission to drill in Lancashire area. As soon as the drilling started in 2011, the residents of who live in drilling areas have been complaining that tremors are felt every now and then. Although fracking companies claim that fracking's procedure poses less risk to the environment, and helps to transitions the shift from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy, other problems such as noise pollution and traffic have been identified. The tension worsens as the fracking companies tend to be not transparent about the company's logistics and the noise pollution problem.

Friends of Earth Fracking Protest 

Despite all the short term benefits fracking can offer, just the process of drilling itself is relatively expensive in the UK because the walls to be drilled have to be deeper due to geographical condition (£33bn estimated infrastructure spend needed by UK). We are also concerned the long run impact of fracking operation because of the water contamination from chemicals, also if something goes wrong with the well, the gas and fluids can leak into the ground or water supply higher up.

Tainted water collected from a drinking water well near a fracking site in Pennsylvania

Instead of just saying that fracking is bad without thinking of any further actions, our initial plan to kick off the project is to visit a protest in Blackpool and try to present a better existing alternative to shale fracking ask some questions about it. By doing so, we would like to leave a positive thought to the protester and hope that people will be aware and more willing to support research and development for alternative renewable energy.

Desertec Solar Panel Technology

 Some gadgets that can generate alternative renewable energy and their pros and cons:

Desertec

A log term half-trillion dollar solar project that will occupy parts of Sahara, Middle East and Europe. If the project is successful, it could produce enough electricity to meet 15-20% of Europe's energy demand by 2050 while providing power to the Middle East and Northern Africa as well. 

PETE Device

A technology that the University of Stanford has been developing. Their plan is to cover 6,500 square miles of the desert in photovoltaic systems and wind parks.

I did some reading on wind energy as well, but I feel more strongly about the solar energy as a better long-term solution. 

Tom mentioned that the University of Leeds Physics departments are doing some research with solar batteries as well, which we might check out in the near future before we sort out what we want to say and ask when we go to Blackpool to get some materials. We also considered to have a chat with some personnel from Frack Free Leeds to investigate more about the negative impact of fracking and what solution they think will be able to replace shale gas energy.

Summary of our thoughts on animating medium:
- Traditional, use recyclable materials such as newspapers and brown papers.
- Animation as an impression based on the people we interviewed

Me, Rosie and Tom agreed that infographics is a bit dull, even though it is aesthetically pleasing, so we sort of want to avoid making one.

Sources

Environmental problem caused by fracking:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/21/cuadrilla-lancashire-fracking-should-be-refused
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/04/friends-of-earth-ticked-off-claims-anti-fracking-leaflet
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/fracking
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10901879/Before-you-back-Britains-fracking-boom-drill-down-into-the-details.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gas
http://www.ecowatch.com/fracking-and-farmland-1881692282.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/27/shale-gas-alternatives-environmental-economic-impact-fracking


Alternative solutions:
http://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2015/01/importing-solar-energy-into-the-uk
http://inhabitat.com/stanford-harnesses-light-and-heat-with-new-solar-tech/
http://inhabitat.com/solar-energy-from-sahara-will-be-imported-to-europe-within-5-years/
http://inhabitat.com/desertecs-first-solar-power-plant-to-begin-construction-in-morocco-next-year/
https://energy.gov/eere/wind/advantages-and-challenges-wind-energy
http://www.cpre.org.uk/what-we-do/energy-and-waste/shale-gas/the-issues?gclid=COqU6e7289ECFUe37QodIkoGAA