Don't be trapped
by your mental health
A short animation showing how a student suffering from symptoms of depression might feel and getting them to reach out for support
Student minds
Our idea responded to the Creative Conscious brief, which called for highlighting current issues and advocating change. We chose mental health, focusing on students due to factors like being in a new environment, academic and financial stress, poor sleep and diet as well as drinking culture.
Each of us created an animated short on mental health symptoms, aiming to help those experiencing a "dip" prevent it from worsening. My focus was on depression, getting me researching student experiences, including Dan’s, along with common triggers and professional advice. Our animation would also be backed by the charity student minds.
Workshops
Initial experiments in various animation processes from workshops, including story boarding and hand drawn animation, we also got taught the the main principles of animation in these workshops which really helped give an idea of were to start with animating .
Storyboard and animatic
We wanted our animations to feel personal so I came up with the idea of zooming in on a person's expressions to really convey their emotion. After many iterations and feedback, I settled on a storyboard where the subject’s face becomes trapped by a negative force, symbolizing depression as a weight.
We all agreed to end our animations with a torch highlighting the Student Minds logo to emphasize available support. I initially considered transitioning to a counseling scene but scrapped it for cohesion within all our animations. I then developed an animatic to refine pacing and sound implementation.
Mixed media
We agreed on having a mixed media style as we could have real students in the footage to make it feel more genuine and then animated assets in between to make it engaging. I chose to have the style of the animated face be very simple so anyone could place themselves in the animation, as well as having the paper texture for the background and negative force so it stuck with the mixed media look we were going for. This is where I also did some animation tests using hand drawn techniques, so the expressions of the face would feel very cartoony and playful.
Keeping cohesion between our animations, I used black and white for the main colours as our intro (made by my teammate hana) and outros were both black and white. But I had the face in this bright blue to make it look like it was drawn with a marker for our mixed media look.
Context
Our animations would be viewed on social media apps like tik tok and instagram because of their short runtime and as that's where students would be mostly likely to see it.
We decided our starting frames would all open on a statistic to grab the viewer's attention and highlight the issue, and then all end on a flashlight highlighting the student minds logo, as this made our campaign feel stronger.