The Challenge

This project challenged us to create a motion graphics sequence inspired by a chosen piece of text, with a considered audience and aim in mind. In recognition of how a lot of people might be feeling with the pandemic, Toby and I chose to create an animation about mental health and stress, with the intent to make students feel more comfortable with the idea of seeking support.

Creative Conscience Award: Bronze Winner in Animation category

To begin with, myself and Toby carried out some individual research and came up with a number of potential ideas for our animation. I decided quite early on to narrow down my topic choices to mental health as I feel that it is a rising concern with the current pandemic and its implications on psychological wellbeing. I researched into quite a few different areas within this topic, including misconceptions about OCD and cultural mental health stigma. I eventually found a TED talk by Kelly McGonigal about stress that I found incredibly interesting and thought had great potential to be turned into an animation with a significant call to action.

Defining our Aim

Stress has always been a huge issue amongst students, and it has been massively exacerbated by the pandemic for a lot of people. Despite students generally struggling with mental health now more than ever, many are not seeking support that could be beneficial to them. In a recent study published by the BBC about students who had reported worse mental health since the pandemic started, only 29% actually accessed help services.

In a CNBC article, it is suggested that there are many different psychological reasons as to why people find it difficult to ask for support, including fear of being perceived as needy or demonstrating weakness. We wanted our animation to encourage the audience to view stress differently (whilst remaining sensitive of the complexities of psychological wellbeing), and to change how comfortable people feel accessing help.

The call to action of our animation is to ask for help. The aim is to normalise asking for support, and to combat the notion that needing support is a sign of weakness. Through an explanation of the fight or flight response and the body's innate motivation to seek help with managing stress, we want the animation to gently nudge students to speak to someone when they are struggling.

Early Storyboarding

We created several storyboards throughout this process; it was important to get every idea onto paper, even if we discarded it in the end. This way, we were able to go through and pick out the strongest concepts to develop further. Creating these storyboards also allowed us to figure out how the sequence would flow, and we began thinking about how specific scenes could transition into the next.

I also created a few very rough GIFS just to get a sense of how individual concepts could work in terms of movement. I ended up really liking the raw, jittery effect created by these frame-by-frame GIFS, and thought we could incorporate this technique within our animation.

We originally used a free handwritten font, but it felt very static and unnatural in comparison to the other components within our animation. I decided to create all of the type by hand, in a very playful but legible style.

Using layers in Photoshop, I then turned lots of the illustrations into GIFs to add a further element of subtle movement.

Development

Myself and Toby divided up the storyboard so that we each primarily animated a few scenes, but we ended up sending things back and forth and working collaboratively on compositions for most of the process.

I worked hard to develop new skills in After Effects throughout this project and found myself getting more and more familiar with the programme. To add depth to the scenes with the lungs, heart and blood vessels, I learnt how to create an infinite, looping background with little dots of varying size and opacity, some with a blur effect. This was really effective in creating a sense of movement within these scenes. Some other new techniques that I experimented with were distortion effects, the offset tool and track mattes to add texture.

Throughout the development process, we made sure to carefully consider our audio and placed sound effects in early so we could sync movements appropriately, for example with the heart beating and the characters popping into frame during the endscene. 

Adding the Cherries on Top

We were really pleased to receive great feedback during our final critique. Mark and Tim thought the animation had a lot of charm that was appropriate for the context, and said that we had demonstrated a good understanding of timing and audio. At this point, Tim suggested that we had a 'fully baked' animation and could now spend some time adding some cherries on top with tiny finishing touches. This included refining the transitions between scenes, ensuring that the audio was perfectly synced and adding in more small details such as eye movements.