MED3018M-2021-R&D

Below are the final outcomes that I have produced for this project that consist of two animations that discuss the topic of mental health, and a trailer for these animation that is part of my EPK. Below is the original project outline that I set my self, with the main points being;

• Create 2 – 3 animations discussing mental health
• Make the animations educational
• Have consistency with the animations.
• Present the animations on Youtube

For this project I plan on creating a portfolio of two to three animation videos talking about mental health and positive mental health for primary school age children. I have chosen to focus my mental health videos on this age group because I think the topic of mental health, especially positive mental health is something that children should be learning about at a young age. Mental health effects many people within society, so creating videos informing children in a child appropriate manor what mental health is, and more importantly, how to create positive mental health, then hopefully the stigma around mental health will begin to decline and more individuals will understand how to create positive mental health for both themselves and others.

The videos will be presented in a fun but educational manner and will hopeful inform children on what mental health is, and how to go about creating positive mental health. While the animations will make sense as their own videos, they will also interlock and work as part of an education and informative series. These videos once complete will then be presented on a YouTube channel which I will market to link into the theme of these education mental health videos to keep the continuity of this project.

While I was unable to create three animations due to time constraints, I did create a detailed narration script and storyboard that illustrate what that animations would have been about had I had more time on this project as shown in the posts

• Draft Script: Animation Two | How to look after your mental health
• Storyboard: Animation Two | How to look after your mental health

In regards to the other goals that I set myself, I believe that I managed to meet them with the creating of my animations. I managed to keep consistency with my design style though both animations and presented the information about mental health in a fun and engaging formate that would not intimidate my target audience of seven to eleven year olds.

What is Mental Health?

Signs someone may be struggling with their mental health?

EPK Trailer

Bibliography 

Katherine Leveridge (2021) EPK Trailer for Mental Health Animations. Available from: https://youtu.be/n0Mu0Lgn-Y0 [Accessed 20 May 2021)

Mental Health (2021) Signs someone may be struggling with their mental health. Available from: https://youtu.be/B-YRiEl9WTU [Accessed 20 May 2021]

Mental Health (2021) What is Mental Health? Available from: https://youtu.be/WrIazsW9Cpo [Accessed 20 May 2021]

Because my project has a real world function of informing children on the topic of mental health and I am trying to engage with a specific audience, it is important that I make my animations as accessible as possible so that everyone who wants to can watch and learn from my animations.

Accessible means to be easy to use and approach and so making sure that there are subtitles available for audiences that have hearing impairments, and text that is legible for those with visual impairments are all things that will help to make animations as accessible as possible.

Adding Subtitles 

Below is a screen grab illustrating the process of adding subtitle to my animations in order to make the accessible for those with hearing impairments. To do this I had to go to video details on the video and then select the language that I wanted the video subtitles to be in. I then clicked on the subtitles section and got YouTube to add English subtitles to my animations.

Here is a screen grab showing that the English subtitles work on the video, making them accessible to people who may having hearing impairments.

I also changed the typeface of the text that I used within my animations in order to make it more legible for those who may have visual impairments. Below is the typeface that I stated off using for my animations. While the colour means that the text is easy to see in contrast to the background colour, the use of a slightly cursive font makes the text a little heard to read, especially when you consider my target audience if 7-11 year olds who might struggle to read text written in this style.

I then changed all the text to a more legible typeface as you can see from the image below. The letter are now a lot more spaced out and are no longer joined up making the text easier to read.

Overall I have done a fair amount in order to make my animations as accessible as possible by adding subtitles to the videos and making sure that all the text within the animation is in a clear and legible typeface so that people who struggle with their hearing or sight will still be able to learn from my educational animations. If I had been creating these animations with the actual purpose being to show them to children and having them be an education resource used by schools, then I would have spent more time trying to make these animations as accessible as possible. Making the lip-sync with the character so clear the people could lip read from it would be one of these changes. However, because I am only a university student and this project is part of my coursework, the actions that I have taken to make my project as accessible as possible are enough.

In order to make my animations look more professional I decided to make thumbnails for them. While YouTube does give a selection of three thumbnails to chose from when you upload a video, these images are just a random selection of still from the video and don’t wholly encompass what my animations are about, which is why I decided to create my own.

Screen shots of creating thumbnails

Below are a collection of screen grabs that show the different design styles that I experimented with before deciding on the final thumbnail images.

For the first animation the is discussing what mental health is, I thought that it might be a nice idea to add my main character into the thumbnail and so below is the result of my first attempt creating a thumbnail for my first animation. I’m not overly happy with the outcome of this attempt as there is a lot of blank space and image just looks quite empty.

For this attempt I decided to try adding my logo for that animations and then putting the title of the animation over the top. While I definitely think that this attempt looks a lot better than my first one, i’m still not happy with it. I don’t think that the text works being placed over the top of the logo as it makes the centre look too cluttered and messy.

Thumbnail for animation one

After experimenting with different layouts I finally decided on this thumbnail for my first animation. It is simply my main logo and then the title of the animation below. This image clearly represents what my animation is about through the use of my mental health logo and having the title of the animation on the thumbnail in a clear and legible typeface that is also used with the actually animation itself. By using this design I will also be keeping in consistency with my animations and brand due to this image actually featuring within the title sequence of my animation.

Thumbnail for animation two

In order to keep my animations and style consistent I decided to use the same approach for the thumbnail of my second animations as I did for the first. This meant that they only element that needed changing was the title of the animations.

I am very happy with how these thumbnails have turned out. By doing this I have made my videos and the YouTube channel dedicated to these animations look more professional and sophisticated, which is an essential quality when creating education resources.

Below are my final mental health animations. The first one discusses what mental health actually is while the second one talks about the signs that someone may be struggling with their mental health. I had also planned out a potential third animation that would discuss how you should look after your mental health, however due to time restraints I was only able to create two of the three animations I had originally hoped to create.

What is Mental Health?

Signs someone may be struggling with their mental health?

Overall I am very pleased with how both these animations have turned out. There is constancy within the design style for both animations, helping to suggest that both are part of the same educational resource. The design style also has helped to present the subject of mental health in a non-threatening manor, which was a key aim for my animations as I wanted them to be informative and education, and not intimidating to my target audience. I am also very happy with how the final narration and lip-sync turned out within the video. While their are some minor issues, such as the tone of the voice over and how some of the transitions cover the character while she is talking, these are little issues that if I had had more time I would have fixed, but overall I am happy with the outcome of the animations.

Bibliography 

Mental Health (2021) Signs someone may be struggling with their mental health. Available from: https://youtu.be/B-YRiEl9WTU [Accessed 19 May 2021]

Mental Health (2021) What is Mental Health? Available from: https://youtu.be/WrIazsW9Cpo [Accessed 19 May 2021]

Due to my target audience being children, I need to make sure the where I place my videos is appropriate for them to access. Because of this I decided to create a YouTube channel dedicated to my mental health animations as illustrated in the image below.

I decided to upload my animations to YouTube as it is a platform that a lot of individual, including children, tend to use to to watch videos on. When uploading my animations I made sure to select ‘Yes, it’s made for kids’ so that when people watch my videos no personalised ads or notifications will appear and the comment section will be disabled so that people can’t leave nasty comments, as shown in the image below.

These precautions will help to make my videos more accessible and child friendly for my target audience. Because I am making these animations as an educational resource it is vital that I keep a professionalism about the work, which is why I created a dedicated YouTube channel for these resources and made them child friendly, to suit my target audience.

To finish my animations off I decided to add some background music from Bensound which has royalty free music. When first researching different mental health animations and mental health videos on YouTube I discovered that there was a pretty even split between ones that did include background music and ones that didn’t. For my animations I felt that it would be appropriate to add background music in order to keep the tone of the videos light. One of my main goals with these animations was to create a resource that helped to de-stigmatise mental health and help present it as nonthreatening, which I believe the addition of the appropriate music helps to achieve.

After looking at all the free sound tracks I decided to use the once titled ‘A day to remember’ as I felt that the tone of the music was light and the tempo not too fast or upbeat that it would distract from the animations of narration.

Screen shots of adding background music to the animations

Below are a collection of still the outline the process of adding the background music to my animations. Once I had decided on the music ‘A day to remember’ I downloaded the file and then imported it into my Premiere file that contained my animations.

I then went about making the background music quieter so that it did not overpower that narration and would instead be a more gentle tone in the background, not during to much attention away from the rest of the animation.

I then went through the entire animation to make sure that the narration was clear throughout the entire project but that the background music was still present within the animations. I also checked that all the audio was within the right range and not too loud that it went into the red or too quite that people would struggle to hear it.

I then cut the background music so that it was the same length as the rest of my animations before adding a fade towards the end of the animation so that the music would gentle die down as the animations came to an end.

Once I was happy with how everything looked and sounded within my animations I then went about exporting the Premiere file so that I could then upload the video to my dedicated YouTube channel about Mental Health. Once I had done this I then went about repeating the same process with my second animations.

I am very happy with the final outcome of the audio that I used for my animations. I think that the background music that I chose for my animations fits very nicely and does not distract from the main elements of the animations. The music has a fun and upbeat tempo without being t0o comedic and mocking the subject of my animations.

Here I recorded the animations and the lip sync for the character that will be in my second animation. In order to achieve this I completed the same process the I did in the Development of Animation One | Syncing Audio with Character before recording the animations of the character breaving and moving slightly in order to give her more life.

Once I was happy with how the recording looked I then exported the scene out of Character Animator before importing it into my After Effects file and I began the process of replacing my place holder character with my now animated and lip synced one.

Animation Development | Part Eighty-five

https://youtu.be/EphVvLG-ZJ8

Animation Development 2 – Test 5

Below is the first draft of my second animation with the lip synced character and the narration imported into the After Effects. As is visible from the video below, there are a lot of issues that need fixing in this animation. To begin with the narration seems to start in the middle of a sentence rather than at the beginning. There are also a few instances where the animation is out of sync with the narration and some of the place holder characters have not been deleted from the scene. The animation also doesn’t finish where it is supposed to and instead ends on the character which is not what it is meant to do. Because of this I am going to have to go back into the After Effects file and make some adjustments in order to fix these issues.

https://youtu.be/7SQQNO02d1k

Animation Development 2 – Test 6

Below is the final outcome for my second animation from After Effects. I managed to solve the issues that I was having in the previous tests so that the narration begins at the beginning and not in the middle of a sentence, as well as deleting all the place holder character and making sure that the narrations lines up with the correct animated scenes

https://youtu.be/I02pNuRaOww

Overall I am very happy with how this second animations has turned out especially after all the mini issues I faced while trying to get my animated and lip synced character into the animation. Now that I have finished the animating of both my animations, my next step will be to add the final touches such as background music before exporting the videos out and uploading them to the YouTube channel that I created specifically for these animations.

Bibliography 

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development 2 – Test 6. Available from: https://youtu.be/I02pNuRaOww  [Accessed 18 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development 2 – Test 5. Available from: https://youtu.be/7SQQNO02d1k [Accessed 18 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development | Part Eighty-five. Available from: https://youtu.be/EphVvLG-ZJ8 [Accessed 18 May 2021]

Here I began the final assemble of my animations by importing the animated and lip synced character into the animation within After Effects.

Screen Shot of Final Assembly

Animation Development |Syncing Audio with Character | 2

Here is a time-laps recording where I recreated the lip-sync for my animation as well as re-recording the animations such as the eyebrows moving, the character breathing and other minute movements that help make my character seem more real.

https://youtu.be/HqImnUOPg_8

Animation Development | Part Eighty-three

Below is another draft of my first animation the now includes my narration and animated character. This test draft is already a lot better the my last one as the character is not in sync with the narration.

https://youtu.be/gyX7cSrNhaw

Animation Development | Part Eighty-four

Here I have continued to develop my first animations by importing my animated and lip synced character into the rest of the animation. After the test above came out successful I had more confidence in adding the rest of the scene that had my animated character into the animation. The time-laps video below shows the process of adding the character and then animating her transitions from scene to scene.

https://youtu.be/-whXJKiyV6A

Animation Development – Test 6

While this test started out pretty well, parts of the narration suddenly become louder and there are sections where the narration is still going but the character is not longer lip syncing. The narrations also cuts off at the end before it has finished. All of these are pretty major issues that I had to go back and change

https://youtu.be/SlvC80mUs84

Animation Development – Test 7

Below is the final outcome of my first animations from After Effects. I managed to solve the issues that I was having in the previous tests so that my character is lip synced to the narration completely and the audio doesn’t have sudden changes audio level.

https://youtu.be/F9L1W5kCkYs

Overall I am very happy with how this first animations has turned out especially after all the mini issues I faced while trying to get my animated and lip synced character into the animation. Now that I have finished the animating of my first animation, my next step will be to record the animation of my character for the second animation and then import the scene into my After Effects file.

Bibliography

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development – Test 7. Available from: https://youtu.be/F9L1W5kCkYs [Accessed 17 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development – Test 6. Available from: https://youtu.be/SlvC80mUs84 [Accessed 17 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development | Part Eighty-four. Available from :https://youtu.be/-whXJKiyV6A [Accessed 17 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development |Syncing Audio with Character | 2. Available from :https://youtu.be/HqImnUOPg_8 [Accessed 17 May 2021]

Katherine Leveridge (2021) Animation Development | Part Eighty-three. Available from: https://youtu.be/gyX7cSrNhaw  [Accessed 17 May 2021]