One Soul
Motion Project
Team Project: Holly Ryan, Alyssa Bacaling, Mai Styants
One Soul
Area of focus - Motion, character design, storyboarding, Audio, mental health
One Soul is designed to be a motion graphic advertisement to promote the Age UK service, the silverline, aimed to help the elderly who see the video on the Age UK website to reach out if they are feeling alone.
What is the brief?
Create a motion sequence between 45 to 90 seconds in a group of 3-4 that uses a brief from Creative Conscience
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.
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.
Making a start!
To prepare for this project we did a few experiments with storyboarding, flipbooks, scratching on film, stop motion, audio and recording, as well as an after effects editing workshop. This gave us a wider range of potential styles that we could work with, as well as helped us understand the software and audio that we needed to use.
Putting pen to paper!
Before starting our initial storyboards we got together and discussed the keypoints we all wanted to happen in the story we were telling. Each of us made our own storyboards and then discussed what aspects we liked from each and put them together to make a group storyboard together.
Our overall idea was to have an old man, who we called 'Hamish', to be alone on christmas. He would be watching TV alone when there would be a knock at the door, he would get up with the help of his cane, and open the door to the voices of neighbours coming to visit him.
Reviewed and Finalised
During my initial research into Age UK and this subject, I found that elderly who are visiting for holidays often feel lonelier or worse during the rest of the year when they have no one, so we decided to avoid our initial idea of having people visiting our elderly character on Christmas based on this information.
Also after some feedback from the critical reviews, we decided to focus more 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.
How do we make a loveable elderly man?
For our main character we decided to go for a more soft and round design. I also took the opportunity to try out a few different styles alongside my character designs, ultimately we decided on a more hunched look with no outlines and a clean flat style that would be easy to animate while also looking good.
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.
As this sequence was supposed to be for a game show I designed a basic logo that would briefly play at the beginning of the scenes, a play on the family feud logo, which Alyssa animated along with the bar at the bottom of these scenes.
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.
I was in charge of animating the TV sequence at the beginning, as well as the silverline service showing up on tv, and one panning shot of a mantle with pictures and a trophy.
My journey with Motion design
I was really excited to start this project once I heard it was motion design. It 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 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. Although I had never talked to Holly before, all three of us ended up being very similar and 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.
