Statement of Intent

PPRD task 1 – Statement of Intent

As there are statistics about everything, meaning there are tons of them, I have decided to use statistics about something that I experience quite often and I am against.

I have been working for Tesco, in the dairy department, for the last eight months and the task that I most hate doing is the waste. This consists of throwing away food that is either damaged or out of date. I know by personal experience that most of the times the products that are damaged are perfectly fine for consumption. They are simply thrown away because the staff either haven’t got time or are too lazy to reduce them.

This is a subject that my colleagues and I have discussed a few times at work and I think it would be good to use this personal experience to create my animation.

I have to admit that as a young adult, before working for a supermarket, I had never been aware of the amount of waste supermarkets produce. I’m aware that there are Health and Safety rules and this is part of the reason why they take certain procedures but in my opinion there are not enough efforts made to improve this situation. However, I think that wastage could be approached in a different, more human way.

It sounds so contradictorily to the news we hear all the time about hunger in the world because what is thrown away in our supermarkets and households could feed a lot of people.
My Flash animation is going to focus on the percentage of food waste produced in the UK and I’m going to compare it to the percentages of children that are starving in the world.

By doing this I am not implying that if we didn’t produce food waste there wouldn’t be hunger in the world. I am using this comparison to make it easier for people to realize the amount of food we are throwing away. Statistics are that every household throws away 30% of the food they buy.

The visually style of my animation will be quite simple, using a few drawings I am going to create on illustrator and Photoshop. I want to use as much text as imagery. In regards to the text, I am intending to add a few effects on it. I have seen text-based animations before that are really interesting.

Here are a few websites I have found relevant so far:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/waste/data/official_waste_statistics

http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/about_food_waste

http://www.wrap.org.uk/retail/case_studies_research/report_household.html

http://www.foodawarecic.org.uk/food-waste-statistics.htm