It was just the beginning of the global pandemic, yet we had already seen the effects of it on the economy and the toll it took on the working sector. With many adults losing their jobs due to national restrictions, the world saw people scrambling to help each other out financially, but there was a group that was severely neglected. With their parents working harder and facing more stressful situations to keep the family afloat, we saw them alone without accessible interactions with peers, without adequate joy for growth, without a proper childhood. The sector we had overlooked — children.
Our team of four set foot forward and started our project “Bursting the Bubble” to bring awareness to children in compromised situations in the pandemic.
We started out with a research plan to understand more about the general public’s understanding on how the pandemic has affected children. Conducting short surveys with both parents and siblings (with younger children) and peers (aged 16 - 25) we were able to confirm our hypothesis that children indeed lacked the physical activity that allows for healthy mental growth, which had also led to children becoming more lethargic and unwilling to focus on studies.
From there, we partnered up with Playeum Pte Ltd, a non-profit organisation, who focused on creating physical and digital workshops for children of any age and background. We planned to raise funds for Playeum (with a goal of $4000) to aid them in bringing their workshops to children in orphanages or less well off families.
Our execution of work was split into a few main categories.
With only a month to carry out this whole campaign, along with its two week launch, we delegated the work to ensure a good amount of efficiency. I handled mainly the character design and social media motion graphics (storytelling).
Our campaign was focused around our mascot “BB” as we found that many successful campaigns were able to pull heart strings with a cute mascot and heart wrenching storyline.
Working on the character design with Cherine, we created this cute boyish mascot that carried through an obstacle filled storyline. We put the mascot through many harsh times and rewarded our supporters at the end of the campaign through showing the bright and vibrant ending once our donation goal had been reached. Creating the motion graphics and setting of the storyline was quite challenging but was extremely fun and interesting to explore storytelling through not only visuals, but sound as well. I played with different atmospheric sounds and simulated the soundscape of “being in a bubble”, which eventually created quite an intimidating yet lonely feeling in viewers.
The campaign was a huge success thanks to many of our peers, and this was one of the first few projects that I was truly able to understand the intensity and pressure of a real-time project as a graphic designer. When you have a client/partner's name to uphold, there is more pressure to ensure every single plan goes smoothly, and we were lucky enough to have been able to tide through this project while handling different roadblocks that came up.
My favorite part of working on this campaign was getting to create an immersive Instagram story to share with audiences how children trapped in compromised households felt in their day-to-day life during the pandemic. Learning about the stress and pain children of compromised households are put through was emotional and important. It was important that I was able to capture a similar level of anxiety and fear to be conveyed through our videos.
The greatest hurdle of this project was identifying an angle that would encourage people to donate for a rather overlooked community in Singapore. We were sure we wanted to engage with Playeum to support their services, but we had trouble figuring out how to convince people to donate to to help children (as compared to other marginalised groups) during the pandemic. Eventually we settled on the idea of conveying the harsh realities of children in compromised households to really tug on the heart strings of the audience.
It was just the beginning of the global pandemic, yet we had already seen the effects of it on the economy and the toll it took on the working sector. With many adults losing their jobs due to national restrictions, the world saw people scrambling to help each other out financially, but there was a group that was severely neglected. With their parents working harder and facing more stressful situations to keep the family afloat, we saw them alone without accessible interactions with peers, without adequate joy for growth, without a proper childhood. The sector we had overlooked — children.
Our team of four set foot forward and started our project “Bursting the Bubble” to bring awareness to children in compromised situations in the pandemic.
We started out with a research plan to understand more about the general public’s understanding on how the pandemic has affected children. Conducting short surveys with both parents and siblings (with younger children) and peers (aged 16 - 25) we were able to confirm our hypothesis that children indeed lacked the physical activity that allows for healthy mental growth, which had also led to children becoming more lethargic and unwilling to focus on studies.
From there, we partnered up with Playeum Pte Ltd, a non-profit organisation, who focused on creating physical and digital workshops for children of any age and background. We planned to raise funds for Playeum (with a goal of $4000) to aid them in bringing their workshops to children in orphanages or less well off families.
Our execution of work was split into a few main categories.
With only a month to carry out this whole campaign, along with its two week launch, we delegated the work to ensure a good amount of efficiency. I handled mainly the character design and social media motion graphics (storytelling).
Our campaign was focused around our mascot “BB” as we found that many successful campaigns were able to pull heart strings with a cute mascot and heart wrenching storyline.
Working on the character design with Cherine, we created this cute boyish mascot that carried through an obstacle filled storyline. We put the mascot through many harsh times and rewarded our supporters at the end of the campaign through showing the bright and vibrant ending once our donation goal had been reached. Creating the motion graphics and setting of the storyline was quite challenging but was extremely fun and interesting to explore storytelling through not only visuals, but sound as well. I played with different atmospheric sounds and simulated the soundscape of “being in a bubble”, which eventually created quite an intimidating yet lonely feeling in viewers.
The campaign was a huge success thanks to many of our peers, and this was one of the first few projects that I was truly able to understand the intensity and pressure of a real-time project as a graphic designer. When you have a client/partner's name to uphold, there is more pressure to ensure every single plan goes smoothly, and we were lucky enough to have been able to tide through this project while handling different roadblocks that came up.
My favorite part of working on this campaign was getting to create an immersive Instagram story to share with audiences how children trapped in compromised households felt in their day-to-day life during the pandemic. Learning about the stress and pain children of compromised households are put through was emotional and important. It was important that I was able to capture a similar level of anxiety and fear to be conveyed through our videos.
The greatest hurdle of this project was identifying an angle that would encourage people to donate for a rather overlooked community in Singapore. We were sure we wanted to engage with Playeum to support their services, but we had trouble figuring out how to convince people to donate to to help children (as compared to other marginalised groups) during the pandemic. Eventually we settled on the idea of conveying the harsh realities of children in compromised households to really tug on the heart strings of the audience.
