When you Educate a Woman

Project Brief

The Challenge – The Steve Sinnott Foundation have a mission to make sure every child has a quality education. They need to spread the word and let people know what they are doing and why.

How do they do this? By telling stories. Real stories of the people they work with, real stories of the challenges people face, and real stories that will make people stop in their tracks and remember their cause. They tell stories at conferences, in schools, online, and anywhere they can to make an impact.

But they didn’t want to do what other charities do and show tragedy after tragedy. A medley of pity and loss. Not at all. They wanted to celebrate the cultures of the people they work with, showing them in a positive light, and illustrating how people go to extraordinary lengths to make their lives better, and therefore how with help they can achieve phenomenal results.

The Solution – We helped them tell their stories in a meaningful and impactful way by making a compact true story about each of the places they work in. We made these films as animation as it is more cost effective and we can layer in references to historical events and frame each shot with the information needed to make maximum impact. We used hand made artwork to give the films more authenticity and make them stand out from the usual films online.

Results and ROI

We made three films in all, and they are effectively used to show why education is so important, the lengths people go to to get an education, and how this has helped them.

They are deployed in the following manor:

Schools Education For All Day Pack – they are a key part of the pack, with various activities based on on the content of the films. They show children in an engaging way how important education is and the lengths that some people have to go to get one.

Talks and conferences – Talks are broken up with the use of these films. They are used to introduce the work they do in each country they work in.

Online – they are on the charities youTube Channel, website, and can be added to blog posts and social media posts.

Feedback from their audience – The audiences are delighted by the films, they find them memorable and interesting, enabling the message of the foundation to stand out amongst the rest of the presentations.

Testimonial from the client – “Working with Lucy is a real pleasure. Lucy takes time to get to understand what is required, she has tonnes of empathy and kindness, a passion for telling stories and giving people the opportunity to air their authentic voice. I would highly recommend Lucy and her animation work is pretty fantastic too.”

Details, techniques and the story behind the production

Made in 2018, HD

Finding the story

The story that we wanted to tell from Nepal was from the children that find it hardest to access education in there. These children don’t get to learn English, and of the people we found with a similar story, language was still a barrier. I did lots of research on the internet, finding stories told by people and charities that were in Nepal, that were similar to the stories discussed by customer. From this I pieced together a story that seemed to encompass the main things that children face accessing education in Nepal. I then found people in Nepal through online freelancing networks to give me feedback on the story to check that it was a fair representation. The feedback was that it was accurate, but the way I was telling it didn’t fit the culture, so I changed the wording to reflect this. Then found a Freelancer in Nepal to do the voice over.

References

The image references are from a mixture of images I found online of Nepal. After looking at all these images I made up the visual for each scene as an imaginative composite. Each scene is planned to incorporate what I have learned in my research, so some information comes from the voice over and some information comes from the image.

If you listen very carefully you can hear Cicadas, and these were actually recorded in a similar part of Nepal that the story originated from. (Recorded by Colin Hunter and found through Sound Cloud).

Technique

The technique of animation I call ‘scratched cell’. Basically I take a piece of clear acetate and scratch the image into it, then rub oil paint into the scratches, then wipe the oil paint off with a cloth leaving texture lines in the picture to represent the clothing and so on. This creates a very rich line drawing style. Each image is scanned into the computer where I can add the colours in Photoshop, and make animation from the images and parts of images in After Effects, mostly using dissolving sequences, combined with more traditionally animated sequences.