Subsidiary Project - FGM Awareness Project by Creatie Lens Media student Hannah Biernat

In February I took on some extra work to help a third year Creative Lens Media student at the University with her own animated film with the intention of raising awareness of FGM around the world. I helped Hannah by designing all the assets, including characters, props and layouts as well as illustrating them in Illustrator and Photoshop so she could animate them herself in After Effects. I also helped Hannah by teaching her the basics of After Effects and how to animate in the software. I also set up most of the layouts and character rigs in After Effects so she could animate them easier. I followed all the advice and ideas Hannah wanted for her film, and I gave her advice and pointers to help reduce the amount of work for herself, as she didn't understand how much worm would be needed to produce an animated short in the time she had left to complete it.

I enjoyed doing this work for Hannah as not only was is different to my own project, so I could escape it for a little while every week to take a break from it, and the opportunity to expand and improve my skills in Photoshop and Illustrator and designing characters and layouts, but Hannah was pleasant to work with and professional with her organisation and time management, something I am aiming to improve for myself.

I also had the challenge of producing a wide variety of characters which all had different ethnic minorities. This was a choice my Hannah as she wanted the film to get across the message of FGM being an issue people of all ages and origins can help with.

Here are the layouts I did in Photoshop:

All files had the assets on separate layers and named correctly so Hannah could set them up in 3D space if she wished to do so for a particular shot.

The castle file had the hills in the foreground on separate layers which gave Hannah the opportunity to apply multi planing to the establishing shot

The basketball court required to have 3 different layouts as the storyboard Hannah did showed characters on opposite sides of the court talking to one another.

The classroom layout is a panorama file so a camera pan can be applied

I set up the hospital layout above with a mask for one of the characters who is shown in the bed 

All layouts with clouds in the background were on separate layers so Hannah could animate them and add an extra element to her film

This is a shot where two sets of characters are talking to each other on the phone. All props were done in Illustrator.

I had fun doing the above layout, a POV shot of the Princess on the operation table, as I got to experiment with perspective and warped shapes to give the impression of her panicking and feeling worried

The characters in the above photo frame layout where PNGs taken from the posed characters in Illustrator

This is the background for when the Princess is on the operation table and the camera is looking down on her

Here are the characters I did in Illustrator:

I set up all the characters above in After Effects for Hannah using a much simpler menthol than the one I have employed for my film. Instead of puppet pins, I used the CC Bender tool to rig the arms and legs. Although this doesn't allow proper animation, after I listened to Hannah's explanation of the film and the style she wanted, since it is aimed at children primarily with adult audiences also in mind, I showed Hannah how to use this tool and she was ok with animating it. I showed her how to switch between the different types of bends (Bend, Marilyn, Sharp and Boxer) using hold keyframes. I used the CC Bender tool instead of the CC Bend It tool as it is easier to set up and causes less problems with animating layers using the tool. This is because the tool crops the layer automatically and I didn't want to make Hannah worried about things which could have been sorted from the beginning, this is why I chose CC Bender as it doesn't cause many problems if rigged and used properly.