Meet the client
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.
The brief
As part of the drive by the Welsh Government to tackle violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, Hafan Cymru’s Spectrum Project is fully funded by the Welsh Government to deliver sessions on healthy relationships in all secondary and primary schools in Wales.
As well as needing engaging content for their school education sessions, Hafan Cymru was keen to create evergreen content that could be used across the web and social media to promote the programme. The challenge they needed to overcome was how to communicate the messages in a way that would make a connection while being informative and practical.
Discovery
The stories had to engage and deal with sensitive topics for three different age ranges. Rather than attempt to appeal to all in one longer production. We decided to create a series, each dealing with the different age groups.
This would accomplish a few key things. One, it would allow for three separate shorter pieces of content to be used across the different workshops. Second, it would allow us to tailor the language specific to the target audience, rather than create broad messaging. Third, it would allow us to tailor the creative and animation specifically to that audience too, meaning the results would be more effective.
Scripting
Hafan shared some scenarios and situations they’ve encountered that gave us the knowledge to bring the script to life. By imagining ourselves in those situations and feeling the emotions, we were able to tell a story that a child of that age could relate to and hopefully inspire them to ask for help should they need it.
We collaborated closely with the client on the scripting process and once everyone was happy we were ready to move on to concept art.
Concept art
We were keen to find a balance between playful cartoons and showing the serious side of the message. We explored different ways that we could show a child’s worry, fear or anxiety and settled upon a more abstract approach with floating scribbles that we could emphasise with colour, size, and movement as they came into play in the story.
This was a simple and effective approach that allowed us to visualise emotions without having to show the child in a dangerous situation, which may have been too intense for younger viewers.
Storyboarding
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. Hafan Cymru, because they’d had complete ownership and control throughout the whole process, green-lit the storyboards with no changes and were itching with excitement to see it all brought to life.
Production
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 for the series of videos. 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.