So far, my most influential research has been from Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, mainly because its focus on dogs is aptly in line with my project. Before opening her book, my ideas for the animation were mainly about humans and their relationships, using dogs only as a metaphor for this. Now I think that I will go in the direction of making the significance of the dogs more ambiguous. While looking into other animations that inspired me, I realized that what many of them had in common was a simple story line. This inspired me to reform my project, and rather than explore many different instances of conflict, try and focus on two or three (at the most) simple story lines. I am still thinking about what those story lines should be.

Because my project it is starting to become more and more personal, my research has been following the trajectory of questions and inquiries I have had on a personal level, rather than the scientific approach that I thought I would take when I was formulating my question. I’ve been thinking a lot about the representation of emotion of both humans and animals, which also brings me to anthropomorph-ization and why that is such a common practice in animation The representation of emotion is a big part of what makes animation such a relatable medium/genre. Still, less detail and specific human like-ness allows for more projection, and projection seems to be a key component of “realness.” My research has took a turn and it is currently focused on exploring the sweet-spot meld of these two phenomena.

What is making this process uniquely mine is that I’m stuck on any notion of what the final project might be, especially because I’ve never used this medium and my skills is like an uncontrolled variable. Some call that a “lacking adequate planning”, but I prefer “uniquely mine.”