Collaborate – Oxymoron

Following our manifesto, we moved onto examining oxymorons, and how we can represent them visually in the context of our campaign. An oxymoron is, according to yourdictionary.com, a figure of speech containing words that seem to contradict each other. To kick off our own work with oxymorons, we examined two separate ones and sketched some initial concepts based around them:

After examining these concepts, we felt that the idea that best represented our campaign was the third idea for ‘Tough Love’, using a teddy bear (as we did in our manifesto) to represent the idea of tough love by contrasting an object commonly associated with children with an object that insinuates violence.

We decided to further this idea by creating a short stop-motion animation that would ideally be shown on television. From the start, we all agreed that no sound should be present in this animation, as if it were an advert on television, the lack of sound would draw attention more than a clip with sound. Within this stop-motion animation, we wanted to explore the relationship between an adult and a child who is neglected by said adult, and how they may often feel in a situation of neglect or abuse. With this in mind, we decided to alternate between colour and greyscale imagery to reflect the mindset of an adult, who believes they are helping the child (colour), and the mindset of a child who is a victim of neglect (greyscale).

Some of the difficulties we encountered when making this animation included the tripod legs being present in many of the frames. We worked around this by cropping each frame slightly, bringing attention back to the bear.