Did you know that children’s early experiences, from birth to age 5, are critical to their brain development and lifelong learning? This means that there are a ton of opportunities for parents and caregivers to engage with young children to help them be successful in school and down the road.

We worked with our friends at Kentucky Educational Television, a PBS affiliate, to create a short animation, as well as illustrations for a major new web site. The goal of the initiative is to help spread the word about early childhood literacy and help caregivers discover easy ways to engage with kids, turning everyday life into learning opportunities to read, talk, count, play, move and connect.

To learn more about the program, visit letslearnky.org.

Storyboard

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Style Frames

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Animation

We’re thrilled to announce the release of a series of four spots for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Care that Fits You campaign. Produced in collaboration with the wonderful folks at MORE Advertising, these spots use a storytelling approach to promote overall wellness in the gay community, as well as the use of the PrEP, an HIV prophylactic medication. The key goal of the campaign was to normalize the experience of talking about sexual health and encourage viewers to seek out care that fits their individual needs.

Here’s a closer look at the production process for Episode One:

Research

The campaign is meant to reach audiences across Massachusetts, but the key target audience is in Greater Boston, so we did a bunch of research of our hometown to get the right kind of scenery and backgrounds.

Storyboard

Here are some storyboard frames from the project, emphasizing lots of movement in a bustling city on a busy day and the normalcy of video chatting with a friend in the middle of it all.

Animatic

With more complex projects like these, it is helpful to create an animatic with scratch audio to show the overall timing of the video and to make sure that the storyboard images work when put into a time framework.

Character & Background Designs

Next it was time to design the two main characters. Jen put together this lineup for the client to choose from:

Meanwhile, Songyi worked on the backgrounds, which she produced as flat artwork, meaning they did not have textures or lighting applied:

Animation & Sound Design

Once all the backgrounds and characters were created, Jen and Mollie tackled the animation and final compositing of lighting and texture. Here’s the final product, complete with sound design by Taiko Sound.

Episode 1: Talk To Your Doctor About PrEP

Episode 2: Get The Facts About PrEP

Episode 3: Find The Care That Fits You

Episode 4: Care That Fits You – Telehealth

Over at azucarfilm.com we’ve got an in-depth project breakdown of our short film, Azúcar. Check it out to go behind the scenes on production.