The TASK
Child safety is the topic that never loses its relevance. And child injury prevention is something that requires active informational coverage. Every year, hundreds of children become injured in accidents, that happen due to the oversight of parents and adults responsible for them. There are many scenarios for such incidents and they are very diverse, but what all these childhood misadventures have in common is that each of them can be prevented. Our studio happened to have a chance to make a contribution to solve this problem. We were entrusted with the creation of series of informative animated clips for Unicef.
HOW TO BRING UP A SCARY TOPIC
Showing children in a moment of danger but avoiding any coarse imagery, was not an easy task. It required a neat work with storytelling that we started to setup with initial sketches. Carefully crafted storyboard is a perfect way of presenting ideas to client before putting a lot of resources into production, which was especially important with such project where a lot of precise changes were done on a stage of story building. Constant consultations and guidance from professional child care specialists and doctors, including even state emergency service specialists, together with our expertise in a storytelling and video production, helped us to create a series of solid scenarios for future videos.
After storyboards were completed and signed off, we started to work on illustrations and animation, carefully bringing our ideas to life.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE DESIGN
One of the most important stages in production of an animated film is development of it's visual style. With this project we had to find bright, eye-catching and modern-looking imagery that would fit and highlight the general idea of the project. Moreover our task was to create the look that would be attractive to both the child and his adult parents.
The development of the look of these films started from character design. The client, Unicef, had a wish that the main character of animated films would be their mascot called Unic.
Unic is a rather famous character, that is familiar to Belarusian audience from various magazines, brochures, stickers, toys, life-size puppets and etc. For us it raised an interesting task - taking an existing character, that already has distinguishable features, and redesigning it in a way that will allow us to use him as animated character.
An animated character is very different from character that is designed for a plush toy or printed page for example. Not only it has a different expressive tools but also it should be done with an account of technical limitations of the media. We sketched various variations and tried different body shapes, proportions, facial expressions in order to find one that will suite all needs and purposes.
CHILDREN
Creating films about childhood injuries required us to develop quite a bunch of children characters in various roles. Tiny toddlers in onesies, kids with scooters, kids playing in water etc.
And since target audience of our films is Parents in a first place we payed a lot of attention to the look of kid's character's. We tried to make them cute but vulnerable, so viewer would feel immediate sympathy to them.
From a draft pencil sketch...
... to a refined vector drawings ready to be used in animation.
6 PROBLEMS, 6 SOLUTIONS
The project consists of 6 films each dedicated to a different type of danger child might face in his life. From the very beginning we worked with all clips together as a series. We developed a pallet, according to which, each film received its own distinguishable color that fits its thematic and helps to logically separate clips form each other.
WIndows
Film that describes dangers of opened windows for a small children and delivers ideas and advices of how to avoid accidental opening of windows and how to keep children safe at home.
Choking hazard
This film tells about danger of small items that toddlers and small children like to put into their mouthes with a high risk of them to stuck in a body. Through colorful illustrations we showed a list of the most widespread objects that are the most dangerous for kids, in order to let parents know what and how they should hide from kids.
Household hazards
Clip about household hazards pays parent's attention to dangers that small child can meet at home. Household chemicals left unattended, kitchen utensils, electrical outlets, flammable objects and etc. How to fix the situation? See our video for an answer!
Danger on the road
Road is a dangerous place. Especially for a child. In this clip parent will find out how to teach child about Traffic Laws and good behavior on the road and how to behave on the road himself.
Danger on the water
Summer holidays is fun but dangerous time. Every year dozens of children gets drowned and die in lakes, rivers, pools and even baths and buckets. Our film tells viewer how to prevent horrible incidents that can happened to the child on the water.
Tubing
Tubing is a kind of winter entertainment that got very popular among children in resent years. However doctors and rescuers sound the alarm! Tubing appeared to be very dangerous and has a high risk of causing injures. This film should rise parent's awareness about the situation and make them choose different type of recreation for their children.
Graphic elements
This project required a use of a big amount of infographic elements, since the best way to deliver a relatively big and dense chunk of information is to put some labels and tables on to screen. For this reason we developed a notation system consisted of different plates to accompany text statements.
PRINTED FOLLOW-UP
It turned out, that elements and characters we created are a great match to create a series of prints, distributed across all the places which are frequently visited by chilndren and their parents together. Bright colors and eye-catching visuals became a great addition to lots of child clinics and schools across Belarus.
in conclusion
We consider this project a success. We believe that our team, with a help of child care specialists, pediatricians, and child education specialists, managed to create a helpful tool to inform parents, which not only fulfills its social task but also meets a level of artistic quality. And high amount of positive reviews received both from client and viewers confirm this.
As a helpful tip - we would like to remind or current and soon-to-be clients, that we provide special rates for socially important projects, like this one. Contact us to get started!
Credits:
Client: Unicef
Agency: AGT
Production team:
Paul Goluzov
Hleb Kuftseryn
Fedor Ivanovsky
Tatsiana Patotskaya
Plato Sound
