The Navigator Project is funded by the Greater Manchester Violence Reduction Unit and operates in Emergency Departments across MRI, RMCH, Salford Royal, Royal Bolton, and Wythenshawe Hospital.
It provides personalised support to 10–25-year-olds impacted by violence, whether presenting to A&E with injuries, or referred from the community. The challenge is not lack of service, it is lack of awareness. Young people and referrers often do not know the service exists, how it works.
Collaborating with the Navigator team at Oasis Academy, MediaCity, we created short animations, telling real life stories of three young people who have been affected by violence or have found themselves with trouble in their lives.
With minimal branding in place, we were tasked with carefully sculpting an art direction that would maximise impact when telling the stories of the young people whose stories we needed to bring to life, matching the tone of the subject matter in an effective and sensitive way. We relied on a mixture of direct and clear illustrations reflected in the narrative fused with the use of conceptual visuals and an engaging flow of motion with interesting transitions.
We implemented a distressed illustrative style, taking care to use a nondescript approach to the representation of people within the story, making the animation as accessible as possible to those of all demographic, race, age and gender, being mindful that the message was to be received by as wide a young audience as possible.
The animations were to be narrated by those who had first hand experience of this world, telling their own stories of their experiences. Using a ‘visual essay’ style of storytelling.
We relied on a mixture of direct and clear illustrations reflected in the narrative fused with the use of conceptual visuals and an engaging flow of motion with interesting transitions. We implemented a distressed illustrative style, taking care to use a nondescript approach to the representation of people within the story, making the animation as accessible as possible to those of all demographic, race, age and gender, being mindful that the message was to be received by as wide a young audience as possible.
The animations were to be narrated by those who had first hand experience of this world, telling their own stories of their experiences. Using a ‘visual essay’ style of storytelling. Through close collaboration with the client, we aided in refining the supplied script, ensuring the story could be told in a clear, emotive and hard hitting way, with maximum impact on its preferred audience, while sticking to an optimal run time for that audience, of around 2 minutes.