06 | Motion Graphics: Why Family Matters (Individual)

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06 Motion Graphics: Why Family Matters

A project by Amore Fourie, Danielle van Deventer, Ella van Jaarsveld, Venus Bebensee, Mandisa Nkumanda

Project Brief

Develop a series of infomotions that articulate these strategies for equal collaboration in ECI provision, tailored to these professionals’ needs within the South African context. Specifically, the team have distilled their research into concise methods of collaboration and modes of communication, across 3 overarching categories that constitute a total of 9 infomotions. Working in 9 groups of five students each, you will be assigned one of these overarching themes. Conceptualise, script, storyboard, design and animate a 120-180 second Vox or Kurzgesagt‒style infomotion that not only unpacks this information, but does so in an engaging, relevant and easy to understand way. It is important to note that the idea is no way that you should ‘dumb down’ the research, but make it accessible.

Technical Specifications

01 Complete 3 narrative and 3 script based exercises

02 Conceptualise and interpret your infomotion piece in the form of a script that will be recorded by a professional voice-over artist from TuksFM

03 Remember that as this is a research-based piece, you will need to cite the sources you use

04 You’ll need to source a score and sound fx for the piece

05 The infomotion pieces will be used separately and as a cohesive toolkit that articulates workable methods for equal collaboration in ECI provision, tailored to the needs of ECI professionals in the South African context

06 You may make use of any media/medium, or a mixture of media as long as it is a) appropriate to your concept and b) works in harmony with the rest of the infomotion pieces

Deliverables

01 Rationale and short, punchy descriptor (no more than 80 words) and thumbnail

02 Reflection document submitted via a Medium link

03 Process work (including independent assignments)

04 Storyboards

05 Animated infomotion (saved in .mov or low-compression format. H.264 with a higher variable bit-rate will suffice)

06 Close Captions (generate in Premiere pro)

Design Strategy

Category 3 | Collaboration with families

Theme 3.1 Why families matter

Working with families, across services to empower them to care for and protect their children, is a core aspect of family-centred practice. This practice revolves around children’s safety and needs within the context of their families and communities.

Development involves the body, mind and environment because it is biopsychosocial, which emphasizes that families play a key role in a child's development. Teams of professionals should have the child’s and family’s needs at the heart of joint planning and decision-making, which is why early childhood intervention is family-centred. The home, whatever form it takes, is the main natural environment where young children develop, play and grow. The key take-away's are:

1. Always consider the family as part of the child’s life and team;
2. Bring family-centeredness to your collaborative team meetings, by introducing them as team members;
3. Ensure the family’s priorities are included in joint planning and decision-making alongside other team members.

For this project, a focus on family and their role were defined. The reason why families play such an important role in ECI practices needed to be conveyed to a practitioner through a video. This theme seemed obvious at first glance and to a professional in an industry, filled with children and their families, it spelt a challenge to renew the meaning of family in a practitioner’s eyes. An analogy played an immense role in our infomotion video concept. It showcases how NASA, a company specialising in all things outer space, left out a single hyphen in written code that destroyed a million-dollar rocket. Like that hyphen, the family can sometimes be the missing link to a child successfully achieving their goals in an ECI program.

The concept was glued together in the video with two illustration styles, namely collage and pencil drawings, to show how they connect and enhance the meaning of each. Our concept wonderfully evolved to using family not just as a resource, but as people with immense knowledge and understanding as experts in the field of their child’s behaviour, development, needs and wants.

View our full medium document here

Research and Key Insights

Key insights and information from an assigned therapist, who helpd guide and inspire our infomotion conceptualisation.

Important information for our infomotion included the structure of treatments, therapy and the practitioner's specialisation. This grounded our infomotion in familiarity and a practitioner's reality.

Scripting

The first task we were assigned was to start the design of our Infomotion. This involved the development of a script to narrate the video. We went through a rigorous process of iterations to arrive at our final script.

Each family tells their own story. When you think of family you can maybe recall spending most of your time in each other's company, you get to know their quirks and preferences regarding food, social patterns as well as their type of personality and attitude. We wanted to create a relatable story for the practitioner, to show them that they are wonderfully knowledgeable and capable professionals that sometimes need to accept help or think differently in order to better their practice as well as positively influence their personal life.

For our script, we used an analogy to tell a story. Our first story is based on the most expensive hyphen in history, an infamous event where Nasa made a single mistake that would have cost them over 150 million dollars today. During the writing of the code for the Mariner 1 rocket, they forgot a single hyphen. The sign "-", is used to join words to indicate that they have a combined meaning or that they are linked in the grammar of a sentence (such as a pick-me-up or rock-forming minerals), to indicate the division of a word at the end of a line, or to indicate a missing element (as in short- and long-term).

Secondly, we have a real-life example where an occupational therapist is hosting a therapy session with a child on the autism spectrum. This brings the viewer back to the present and in the analogy, the hyphen symbolises the connection between the two scenarios regarding the missing link in each situation.

View our script development here

View our research assignments here

Visual Strategy

The visual strategy comprises the creative and analytic decisions that inform our visual expression of the information and so we created a visual identity for our motion graphic. We first structured scenes with existing images and created collages. We then proceeded to trace the put-together scenes where we finally hand-rendered them in our colour pencil visual style.

View our full visual development here

The Process

Process of developing an illustration style for the two different ideas, namely the analogy and the real-life scenario,that are linking together in the design concept. Part 1 & Part 2 visual style exploration is shown here.

Process of structuring scenes for the infomotion

Collage and Illustration

The infomotion is divided into two visual styles, in combination with real source footage of the launch of the Mariner 1 and Mariner 2 rockets. The first style is collage and the second one is coloured pencil illustration. Given the childlike nature of our topic of why family matters in ECI, we used a heavy illustrative style with lots of detail, texture and colour that resembles the drawings of a child.

The first part of the infomotion utilises both visual styles, the illustrative style and the collage, to separate the analogy from the real-life scenario to tie the infomotion together as a singular motion piece. Collage was used because it has a vintage visual theme that is reminiscent of the era during which Mariner 1 was launched as well as the stock footage of the actual launch.

For the second style, illustrations were hand-rendered with traditional coloured pencils on fabriano paper which were transferred digitally to be edited and cut out. They were drawn flat and two-dimensional and were layered in Z-space for the infomotion. This illustration strategy is crafted to have an illustrative approach to a child’s drawing style. By using vibrant colour pencils on fabriano, a sense of child-like nostalgia and creativity is also aroused. This reflects Justin’s age and imagination, as it gives the viewer a sense of his perspective on the world around him.

Planning the structure of the therapist office that will be constructed in z-space in After Effects.

Motion

Character animation will be minimal and will resemble “paper dolls”. Our main motion strategy will be the camera moving through Z-space in Adobe After to shift focus and create transitions in our scenes.

For our infomotion we constructed rooms as well. The rooms were constructed in flat planes, created as three-dimensional space in Z- space. This was done to create an immersive feeling for the viewer as if they were physically part of the scene. The rooms that were constructed are the practitioner’s office, a board room and Justin’s home. These rooms are the basis on which scenes were constructed for the narrative move through the layered visual elements.

Final Moodboard

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Infomotion screenshots

Part 1 & 2 - Visual style

Storyboarding

After consulting with our practitioner and conceptualising we set out to create a narrative that communicates the key message of why family matters. The narrative had to be informative and effective in portraying our key message of why practitioners need to integrate the family more efficiently in therapy sessions. This will contribute to an even more successful outcome for the child at the end of a therapy plan or session.

The team set out and each of us created a narrative frame for the infomotion. After brainstorming we compiled key ideas and weaved them together into one storyboard, taking transitions and possible modes of movement into consideration as well.

Through our storyboard we wanted to tell a story that will arouse empathy within the viewer, so we were inspired by a technique that would have the viewer feel like they are moving through the scene. This technique is based on layering elements in Z-Space within the Adobe program After Effects and moving a camera through the layers which correlate to a 3D perspective. The scenes thus had to be planned carefully, from the background to the characters that feature in each of the scenes. The narrative structure was refined multiple times until we reached the most successful narrative arc for our Infomotion.

The narrative story starts with the Mariner 1 rocket launch in 1962, where we see a rocket flying through the earth’s atmosphere into space. Part 1 ends with the camera moving through NASA’s headquarters transitioning into part 2 of our narrative.

Part 2 is structured around a real-life example of a therapy session with autistic children. The narrative starts with different practitioners and specialists trying to come up with the best solution to help Justin, who is on the Autism spectrum. The camera functions as our primary source of movement taking the viewer through different scenes in the practitioner’s therapy room. At the end of our narrative, we move on to see how effective therapy can become by including the family throughout the whole process.

View our full storyboard process here