Talking Heads

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) approached us with an idea to create a video to help promote vaccine uptake for children in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in north London.

The big ask

The idea was to show a mother asking questions about vaccination and receiving answers from a trusted health practitioner, who is part of the community that she serves. This gave us an opportunity to use a technique we used recently for a video for the WHO and show two animated characters talking, whilst artwork based on the discussion appeared between them. LSHTM already had an approved script and recordings, so this made the process easier.

It was a fairly simple concept - there were three questions and answers, plus a brief introduction and closing statement.

Keeping it simple

We started on a Zoom call and I roughed out a few sketches (see above) to reflect the flow of the conversation and, from these sketches,  developed more detailed versions of the storyboard, as well as two ‘puppets’ for the animated characters. You can see the evolution of the characters below:

Use, use, use!

The video was well received and led almost immediately to an updated version to work for Salford City Council for a more general audience.

This meant making changes to the characters and artwork while maintaining the original audio dialogue.

Fortunately, we build all our original processes for reusability and this came into its own when the new request arrived!

The artwork from the original video is also being reused in a print booklet to help spread the message to the targeted audience of service users.