Charity Sector Animation: ‘Mum, Jenny & Me’

The Media Room set us the challenge of creating a staff training animation for the charity ‘Home Start Birmingham.’ The animation needed to communicate their brand, tell real life stories of a range of survivors and be used for staff training. 

The result is a heartfelt story told through the eyes of a child. It communicates situations that caseworkers come into contact with at the charity Home-Start Birmingham. The success of this animation is demonstrated in the huge emotive response that is still evoked from those that watch the animation and the numerous awards it was nominated for including The Charity Film Awards. 

We spent a lot of time on the Research, Inspiration & Pre Production phase to ensure we could capture and communicate the real heart of the story and visualise the words of our young protagonist. We experimented with many styles of character design and animation techniques until we found the styles we wanted to take forward. 

We complimented a written storyboard with a visual, illustrated storyboard which enabled us to sign off the characters, aesthetics and sequencing with the client before going into animation. Multi-team sign off challenges were overcome with the use of video calls and review tools to ensure precise decisions and edits could be made with the clients in real-time.

The use of Adobe Suite enabled us to create an animatic to understand the timing and rhythm of each sequence and we patiently brought the characters and stories to life by animating each layer frame by frame. We then worked on the background, textures, colouring and after effects.  

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