We don’t give up in Haiti

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 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, technique and the story behind the production

Made in 2016, HD

A celebration

We wanted the film to celebrate Haiti, because it is often portrayed as a tragedy, and the spirit and determination of the people are rarely celebrated in our media. So I wanted to include the bright colours and the carnival spirit abundant there, as well as the determination illustrated for example in students studying by security light during a power cut.

Cultural references

An important way of understanding people is to engage with their culture, so I wanted to reference Haitian painters, and Haitian music. I have directly referenced the Haitian painter Philome Obin, whose work often makes political comments. I made specific reference to the following paintings: Rue 0 (Zero) Du Cap-Haitien, Peasants going to the market, Crossing the stream on donkeys, Toussaint Lourverture, Maison de Odette Lapommeray Acul-du-Nor. I was also influenced by the painting style of Claude Dambreville, who celebrates the ideals of the country.

Historical references

Haiti has an incredibly important place in history, and as a backdrop to the main theme of the film I wanted to make reference to some of this. So we have tent city, survivors of the earthquake surrounding the statue of Toussaint Lourverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, with a group of children defiantly making their way to school. In order to understand Billy’s mother and her choices, I also made reference to what was happening politically around that time in the street behind her and her baby.

I spent a couple of weeks studying Haiti, its culture and its incredible history, to make sure that the film reflected Haiti in the best way I could, to find reference material and the backdrop for the story. The opening section, based on sketches of composites of recent photos of Haiti, give a feel of documenting the current situation there. The memory scene illustrating Billy Jean’s story is based on a composite of paintings by Philome Obin, a naive style painter who included political subjects and observations of Haitian life in his work. It references the political events around the time Billy was born. He is more interested in how things can be improved than in the details of his own story, so I have included some of his comments, focusing on the lengths parents go to, to get an education for their children. I used relevant photo journalism as a basis for researching the content of each shot.

Billy’s Story

One thing we hadn’t envisaged was the challenge of access. I wasn’t able to directly interview Billy, so I pieced together various parts of his story and the situation of education in Haiti. Some of it I had to record from a mobile phone, some from video interview and some by Whats App interview. So I wove this into the film style, showing the audience that this is like a scrapbook of conversations, there are lots of different aspects to education in Haiti. Thats why it is important to let people speak for themselves and find solutions that work for them.

Technique

Mixed media. Hand made backgrounds, with digital animation in TV Paint. Compositing in After Effects.