Case Study
I was commissioned by One Foot In to create two 3-minute animated shorts as mental health promotional videos. "One Foot In" (Endorsed by VicGov). They already had pre-existing assets such as illustrations of characters, and it was my job to bring them to life and tell their story under the guidance of Fred Simmard, Creative Director.
PROCESS
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Brain-storming
Story-boarding
Design
Animation
EARLY PROCESS
Brain-Storming
Due to the personal & differing experiences shared by Bee & Zee, it was imperative that I did not represent these experiences in a skewed or biased manner towards one or another. There is no one right way to navigate the concept of, "Coming Out," and all experiences are equally as valid.
In order to share their authentic experience in an educational manner, I chose the style guide of Text-book collage meets Post-modern. This way it still retained the style of a proven successful educational style, yet the retro feel of some scenes are able to appeal to both an older and younger audience.
STORY-BOARDING
Using Storyboard Pro (Toonboom) I was easily able to sketch out a few ideas which eventually evolved through time.
Important Themes
Embrace & Celebrate Diversity
Mental Health Awareness
Design for Education
Story-telling
Lip Sync - A Journey
Due to the immense on-screen time of Bee + Zee, it was important they had a dynamic lip sync.
Each Mouth gesture was created custom for each character & used toon-boom harmony.
Each layer was converted to an AI file using auto-trace from a rasterised procreate file. Each layer was converted to Ai using auto-trace then each layer that needed to be animated was isolated e.g. Hair, eyes, mouth, hand, forearm etc.
The body rigging was done through parenting and Duik Bassel 2 Plugin.
Metaphor
The crescendo of the animation is when Bee + Zee journey their way to a safe space where they meet Narrative specialist and Psychologist Sekneh.
Due to the metaphorical nature of Sekneh's script it was important that I uphold and elevate their words by displaying metaphors to tell the story. It was also important that each metaphor was multi-layered and multi-faceted.
Additionally, in order to display diversity, it is done in a casual manner throughout the shots - to emulate and mimic real life.
Last Minute Touches
Along with the animation, I created bespoke openers + closers as well as re-sized social tiles and IGTV Instagram Story Verticle tile.
FINAL PRODUCT
SOCIAL TILES + PROMOTIONAL IGTV
5 Promotional Tiles were selected (Ensuring these were all visually different from each other to stand on their own).
To see the full video please visit here on OneFootIn's official youtube channel.*
TESTIMONIAL
“Her animation skills are undeniable; from helping us come up with the concept, to choosing colour pallets, to developing a working schedule, several drafts and finally the finished product, Nina made us feel comfortable enough in her abilities from the start that we decided early on to give her creative freedom and let her take the lead - and we are glad we did.
The finished product, which was 2x short mental health animated promotional videos, has received nothing but praise from health organisations and professionals, counsellors, schools, and universities.”
— Bee + Zee, One Foot In