One Soul
Motion
Team Project:
Holly Ryan, Alyssa Bacaling
Mai Styants
Timeline:
13 Jan - 14 Mar
Concept:
Age UK
What is the task?
Create a motion sequence between 45 to 90 seconds in a group of 3-4 that uses a brief from Creative Conscience
Areas of Focus
Motion
Audio
Character Design
Storyboarding
Mental Health
What path to take?
We chose to focus on mental health, more specifically loneliness in the elderly. We wanted to highlight the isolation that can come to some with age to help people who may be struggling themselves.
One of our main sources of inspiration comes from this BBC clip of a footballer called Tommy Lawrence, we wanted to use our project to bring light back into the eyes of the elerly just like in this video.
How does Loneliness effect people?
I researched the causes and effects on people, especially the elderly, who are dealing with loneliness or isolation.
My research found that if loneliness is severe or lasts a long time it can increase the risk of some physical conditions such as dementia, as well as mental health conditions like stress and anxiety. Older people who lack social interaction tend to have more health problems than those who are not as often alone, as for those who have difficulty seeing or hearing, it is easy to miss new or worsening symptoms.
Where should our project be shown?
While researching the subject, quite a lot of the information I found came from the Age UK website.
We envision our project being displayed on the Age UK website, with a focus on people of 75+, to reach out using their silverline 24/7 calling service.
We reached out to ask some questions, but they have yet to get back to us.
Putting Pen to Paper!
We decided to focus on who our character 'Hamish' used to be, to make him more of a real person rather than a stereotype. We also decided to have him actively defy these conventions by having him reach for a cane to walk, only go past it and grab the phone behind to call silverline. As we were aiming our motion video towards elderly people we didn't want to perpetuate any stereotypes that could upset or turn our audience away.
How will Sound and Colour take affect?
To support the character design decisions, a variation in real vs fake sounds coming from the tv and the real world were decided for the audio. The sounds from the TV would be obviously fake, with the laugh track emphasising the loneliness of the main character, with more real voice lines used for scenes of Age UK to emphasise that difference and the human aspect of the Age UK Silverline service.
This would also play in with the colours used for each type of scene, with the TV using bright pink, blue and yellow as the main colours, while the scenes with our old man would be a sad blue and purple colour. In the final scene the colours are a warm orange to show the comforted emotion in the main character after calling Age UK.
From concept to reality!
We used this animatic to pace everything out and decide how long we wanted to linger on certain scenes, as well as decide what sounds we wanted to go at what points. This was used as the basis of our animation, and we layered all of our scenes on top of this in after effects to ensure everything was lined up correctly, otherwise we would go and alter the scene to fit with the animatic better.
Testing our style
Both of these test animations were made by Holly and Alyssa, however I used their ideas to inform my design and animation of this sequence
Faces made for TV
For the TV scenes we decided to have our characters be more angular with bright colours compared to the design of our old man. I used Alyssa and Hollys design choices to redesign, recolour and recreate these characters.
I designed the female character in the second TV shot, to fit with other designs, and have her feel as if she belongs in this sequence. I chose to use a more fluid style, unlike in the animation tests, I rigged the characters arms, and animated their heads, but still chose to keep the character mostly static, or overly exaggerated in the case of the laughing, to add to the 'false and fake' feeling I was aiming for.
The Grand Finale
This motion graphic project is designed to be displayed on the Age UK website, aimed at elderly people of 75+ age.
We diverted from stereotypes, aiming to instead show the human person, who in the past had a life outside of the old person that the world may now see them as. Due to circumstances that may not be their own fault, they are alone and isolated and we aim to convince them to call the silverline for their mental health.
My journey with Motion design
I was really excited to start this project once I heard it was motion design. Motion is something I have been interested in getting more into for a long while. I have done some basic motion projects in the past, especially last year, however those were mostly hand drawn animations with a little bit of motion typography.
This has probably been my favorite project so far in my time at AUB. Motion is really interesting to me and I want to learn more, especially using 3D for motion as this is something that really intrigues me. I ended up moving over to the AUB student magazine social media and marketing team from the design team just so I could do more motion and marketing projects and practise with the skills that I had learned from this project.
I also really enjoy the process of coming up with ideas for a motion narrative. I love finding the best angels to portray a scene to show the emotion behind it, and I also love telling a story with not only context but visual and subtle storytelling.
Coming up with storyboards was really fun, coming up with different endings was really fun, and actually animating was really fun.
Overall I had a great time with this project, and it definitely helps that I had a team who I got along with really well. We often went out for food and bubble tea after working on our motion project, which helped us to relax and be ready to get together the next day to work more and made the whole project really enjoyable.
