Be The Spark
An animation to raise the awareness of a charity, supporting the elderly who suffer from loneliness.
The Challenge
Over two million of those aged 75+ in the UK go more than a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member (Age UK). Our approach was to create a campaign video that raised awareness for the charity Reengage, and how they help combat loneliness.
Focus
Motion, Sound, Story Design
The Process
When my team and I began this project, we had the freedom to explore any topic we felt passionate about. After some initial brainstorming, ranging from imagination to music, we found ourselves drawn to the theme of elderly loneliness. It’s something which quietly affects so many, yet so often left out of the conversation.
Thats when we came across Reengage, a UK based charity supporting the elderly through tea parties, dance and friendly phone calls, all ran by volunteers.
Our Mission
The First Animatic
We created the first story board and animatic to look at the timing and flow of each scene, and if it created an effective and understandable story.
The biggest takeaway from this animatic was that we needed to move on past the loneliness faster, to focus on the joy and positive emotion that the charity helped create.
The idea of sound transforming a videos impact was interesting to me. Having not used sound before, I created the sound scape for our first animatic. Using sounds found online, I was able to compile them in premier pro and create an animatic where the sound helped bring the story to life.
I also began to edit some of the sounds using effects like pitch and bass changes. For example, when the town hall is first shown, the music sounds muffled, as though its coming from inside, and as the door opens, the audio gets louder and more clear.
Animation Tests
The first animation test I made looked at how I could create the characters movement. Using minimalistic shapes and wiggle effects, I was able to create an animation style that we felt we could achieve throughout the video. I liked how the wiggle effects gave it a handmade look, like with the mug moving slightly each frame and I felt that would work with our animation style.
In this test, I wanted to try an alternate way of having a running scene. At this point, we wanted to show him travelling to the town hall, but didn’t want to fully rig a character animation. Instead I used the reflection in the characters eyes to reflect a road ahead of him, with street lights passing by, which I thought, effectively showed him running, without full body movement.
My first design for the town hall used a more detailed aesthetic than the final version, but the animation remained somewhat similar. There is a subtle parallax effect to show motion within the scene, and the glow around each window and door was used to contrast the dark background and symbolise the joy within.
Animation My Scenes
The Spark through Streetlights
In my first scene, I wanted colour to play a part in representing the warmth and joy of the Reengage events. As The Spark travels through each lamppost, the light glows and pulsates, like it’s come to life, before The Spark moves on to the next lamp.
To create this scene, I used scale and position to make The Sparks movement, and moved the paths comp forward to help create a sense of movement. As each light glows, I used the colours of The Spark to pulsate between each other and create the effect.
The Spark through a Forest
In my second scene, I wanted to keep the same fast pacing of the first, bringing The Spark through a forest. As it passes through each tree, leaves fall from the branches to the ground.
To create this scene, I first used a track matte to transition between scenes, with a tree wiping over the screen. The Spark Remains still here, with the background moving, and a camera keeping The Spark around the middle of the frame throughout. Initially, the spark remained facing forward like in the first scene, however it lacked movement when moving across the screen so I made it spin as it went past each tree.
Burt and The Sparks arrival
In my third scene, The Sparks journey comes to an end, arriving at the Reengage event, held in a town hall. Soon after, Burt arrives too, showing he was following along the whole time.
To create the town hall, I remade my original design using the chosen art style and used the choppy animation to have the town hall wiggle as it came into frame, as well as have the glow made up of wiggling rectangles. The glow is reflected of off Burt as he arrives, which grows in size as he gets closer.