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"Our Focus" is a short video chronicling the first 15 months of Oranga Tamariki, New Zealand's Ministry for Children.
As the lead designer and animator I was responsible for creating the storyboard and coming up with a unique graphic style for the animation. I illustrated all assets and rigged all characters, and animated every shot in the animation. I also added the sound effects and created the sound mix.
In mid-2018, Oranga Tamariki had existed for around 15 months, after being rebranded from the original "Child Youth and Family Services". The new Ministry wanted a video that would show the progress that they had made in that time, while also acknowledging that they faced significant challenges in their work. I was given the task of creating an animation for the Ministry, as they felt this would best reflect their bright, positive outlook. The medium of animation also had the scope to tastefully represent the more difficult parts of their journey.
I worked on the script with members of the Oranga Tamariki Communications team, and together we came up with a narrative that would place a child's story front and center of the video. Putting tamariki first is an essential part of the mahi and values of the Ministry, so it was important that the animation reflect this.
Once we had a script, I set about illustrating the characters and other assets. The brand guidelines had no specifications on illustration style, so I used the Oranga Tamariki brand colours to lead this work. I chose a simple but friendly illustration style that would work well in the bright brand colours. The lead character is a young boy who has big dreams of being a zookeeper-astronaut-scientist, so it was really fun for me to explore these dreams visually.
After illustrating and rigging all of the characters, the next step was animating the script. Sonja de Friez and her son provided the excellent narration, and using this as my guide I built up the animation shot by shot. I used the brand colors in simple shapes to create transitions between scenes and ideas, and using After Effects preset "Rubber Hose" I was able to animate the characters very efficiently.
In the middle of the animation is a section that is more somber. This part of the story illustrates that Oranga Tamariki works with around 30,000 children and young people every day who are at serious risk. This is a shocking number, and I wanted to make this section emotionally impactful without being confronting or scary. So I used a visual metaphor, using flowers and petals to stand in for the 30,000 at-risk children. When the voice over is talking about the children being at risk, I animated wind slowly taking petals away from the flowers. Then when the voice over transitions to talking about making the children safe and giving them hope for the future, I animated hands watering and caring for the flower to help it grow. In this way, I was able to tackle really difficult subject matter - presenting it in a way that balanced disheartening pasts with happy futures.
Flavia Rose: Designer & Animator
Erina Marwick: Script
Sonja de Friez: Voice-over