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. They also need to raise funds for each project and for marketing.

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.

We also helped them set up a Crowd Funding Campaign to raise the funds to do the project. This was the first time they had done this, so we were able to walk them through the process step by step. It was a successful campaign and it enabled them to go ahead with the project, and at the same time increased their reach, adding more supporters to their database.

Results & 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 2017, HD.

Isata’s Story

We tried to overcome the problem of access by using WhatsApp to interview Isata, but it was a little impersonal, and took a long time to build a relationship and get to the bottom of things. However we succeeded and wrote the story between us which Isata recorded on Whats App and sent to me. It has a classic Hero’s Journey structure so I called it Isata’s Journey.

Historical references

It was important to have some of this as a backdrop to Isata, as it would have had a big influence on her. The civil war was raging around her as a child, and her response was to want to work for human rights. Early in the film the woman Isata is aspiring to is a reference to Wangari Maathi. Referring to the context helps to understand the deeper motivations of a person.

Cultural references

As inspiration for the visuals I looked at William Kentridge (South African animator) and Gibril Bangura (painter from Sierra Leon), two very different styles! Kentridge makes an interesting observation about using other people’s stories as material for a film, he calls it “an appropriation of other people’s distress” but the hours spent making an image makes it become a compassionate act, “there is a sympathy towards that subject embodied in the labour of the drawing” and I used hand drawing for that reason. Bangura on the other hand talks about his paintings spreading happiness, an escape from the darkness and a belief in a bright future, so I used bright colours to separate the scenes. I used relevant photo journalism as a basis for researching the content of each shot.

Techniques

Each shot is made by drawing on an A1 card with chalk pastels. I used a technique similar to Kentridge, called the destructive method, each frame is made by altering the previous drawing. Sometimes I build up the image and record the stages, sometime I have animated the image by redrawing over the image so you can see the remnants of the previous image. I used bright colours inspired by Bangura, and the positive spirit of Isata.

Credits

Story and Narration : Isata M Kamara

Directed and Animation : Lucy Lee

Music : Nefeli Stamatogiannopoulou

Sound Editing : Louise Brown

Executive Producer : Ann Beayty

Crowd Funded on Indiegogo

www.stevesinnottfoundation.org.uk

© Steve Sinnott Foundation 2016