Hafan Cymru - Student Disclosure

Hafan Cymru has been building opportunities for people to live well for over 30 years. Their focus is to support people who find themselves in situations that mean they can’t or don’t know how to live safely. Their support helps people find their feet, reach their goals and find independence.

Hafan Cymru’s, Spectrum Project had received funding from the Welsh Government to create a comprehensive training package including an animated explainer video, for all school staff on how to deal with disclosures around domestic abuse tops. The aim of the pack is to give all school staff the confidence to deal with pupil disclosures.

This story had to help staff understand the best practice in a situation where a student might want to disclose an incident around domestic abuse topics. The type of language and style of animation had to be much more mature than other animations we had previously created for Hafan Cymru. Giving the wizards the task of coming up with a whole new style of animation!

Having read over all of the information Hafan shared with us, our writing wizard had to figure out how to subtly show how staff should be reacting during these situations. Including making sure the visuals described the smallest of body language changes in the staff and students, as well as Hafan Cymru’s four R’s appearing as a  main feature throughout the story. 

We knew this video would have a different style, so for the concept art stage, we wanted to show Hafan Cymru what a more mature simple style might look like. Whilst still trying to keep some similar elements from previous videos to help staff recognise this video as a Hafan Cymru asset. By creating a whole range of characters the team at Hafan Cymru were able to start to see how their animation would come to life.

Storyboarding is the first time the client really gets a chance to visualise how the animation will look and flow from beginning to end. It gives everyone a chance to make any last changes to the language, scenery, colours, and characters before we enter the production stage. Because our process is rock solid, any changes or concerns have been worked out by now and storyboarding is a smooth process. For Hafan, it was a chance to see how the all-important 4 R’s were going to fit into the animation as a whole before the very exciting production stage.

Our animation wizards set about building the characters and drawing the environments. We are incredibly proud to have such talented artists working here at Tiny Wizard Studio. They get very passionate and invested in projects and knew that something that has this much emotion attached to it should have a personal touch with hand-drawn characters and traditional methods. We’re so pleased that Hafan Cymru could see the value in this too. As well as the animation, we sourced, sampled and recorded the voiceovers and music. 

And because the organisation is based in Wales, we were so pleased to be able to produce Welsh language versions too, so that Spectrum could continue their work through Welsh-medium schools.