in earnest

having a very unproductive day today after what seemed like a cracking good day of activity yesterday, so a good idea to update this blog and actually write something useful.
Currently I am working out all the technical software/hardware business for the project..
about which i really should write about first..

Secret Womens' Business
(now should that apostrophe be before or after the 's'...is it One woman or All women?)

The project has been developing for over 10 years (with plenty of interruptions in between) but essentially the idea is to produce a series of animated shorts that each deal with an aspect of adult women's lives.. some of the things we all talk about, experience, suffer through, rejoice in, but rarely, if ever do we see these treated in an honest, amusing and creative way - and particularly not in animation.
I have done masses of round-about research in this area...too much to list in this one post.. but plan to incorporate aspects of feminist film theories, current pop-culture theories, theories about animation and in particular, focus on female animators making female-orientated projects. All of this will mangle together in a phenomenally incisive exegesis for my doctorate.
But first,
the project in it's current state.

The overarching approach is to centre the series around a group of women friends that meet up once a fortnight for dinner together. Each 'episode' showcases one of the women's 'story' - a big picture thing that has significantly affected her life that is told from a first person perspective (childbirth, breast cancer, postnatal depression, divorce, aging parents, troublesome teenagers, etc etc) - and although each of us experience these things in different ways, there appears to be a 'universal experience' in many aspects of our lives - much of which is written about in books and blogs and live-action series and films, but less so in the mainstream animation realm.
That is not to say there isn't some amazing and pertinent short animated films out there that have covered some of this territory - and I will be writing about and referencing many of these in the process of the exegesis, as these films and filmmakers have been an enormous influence and inspiration to me for the 20 odd years I have been an animator - but by and large, adult-focused animation still has a distinctly male focus... I am hard pressed to find many mainstream or commercially distributed examples with a strong female main character (but am prepared to be enlightened otherwise).
So a lot of the preliminary research I have done is about the Business of Animation - the mainstream TV distribution models, including statistics about the numbers of lead female characters, the numbers of female writer/director/producers, and also the (slowly) changing climate in childrens' television in terms of central female characters and stories.
As mentioned, I have also been looking at a number of independant filmmakers and productions with a strong female focus and questioning the distribution and marketability of these projects.

so, largely the question relates to the production and distribution and market for female focused adult animation...
but more details about that to follow (this is a very edited off the cuff intro...)

back to the project as it stands...
the first story for this project is about post-natal depression ( a story i wrote over ten years ago while searching for some useful information about the problem and finding very little help except for some photocopied brochures and some self-help groups...okay, that's an understatement, but i realised that there was an opportunity to be able to get a whole lot of information across to women suffering through this situation in a succinct and engaging way - particularly for those that had very little time to read books (most new mothers), or had limited literacy - plus the fact that the visual language of animation can cross international boundaries.
The idea was to create a film for sufferers (and their associated partners and families and the general community) that could give them an 'ah ha' moment...in a short 10 minutes or less, the audience could experience the a) you're not alone, and b) oh my god, is This what she's going through... it's a kind of animated narrative documentary.
Most audio-visual projects I had seen relating to PND were so turgid and boring, they were certainly enough to make you even More depressed if you weren't already, so it seemed important to have some punchy impact, and plenty of black humour to carry it through.
From this, I started to think about other secret womens business...like discovering a lump in your breast and the emotional and physical and practical journey that follows.
Again - there IS material and literature about this, but there's still a hushhhhh about the whole thing that often lacks the 'universal' and engaging approach that is possible in animated form.

The other aspect I've been thinking about is in terms of the networking and distribution of this... how do women communicate these days? what and where and when do they watch stuff? what is the best length and format for this material?
I've always had a penchant for comics, graphic novels, and now web-strips and indeed webisodes.. there's some food for though there in terms of the structure of the projects...being episodic and largely told in vignettes and as part of a daily/weekly journey... more to come about that.

so, there's the concept.
Currently am developing some scenes from the PND episode as a trailer cum pilot.
It seems to be taking the 'animated documentary' form a little more... but not a sort of edutainment infomercial style (these are kinda dirty words)... It should work primarily as a stand-alone film, but my desire was to have some guts and meaning in there also..
I wonder if anyone cares?