MSD Lung cANCER aWARENESS PSA
PR Agency GRF+ reached out to me to help them make this public service announcement animation for their healthcare/pharma client MSD.
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The message is to seek immediate medical attention if one experiences symptoms such as prolonged coughs or difficulty breathing, as pulmonary cancer is more easily treatable when found at an early stage.
The specific challenges to this project were:
1. The animation plays in the media space of online ads that appear on the sides of news pages, so the challenge is for the images to catch attention and read well despite the small real-estate.
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2. Based on this media context, the animation will be seen without sound. Sound is an often underestimated tool for the impact of an animation, so the animation needs to be extra obvious to make up for the lack of sound.
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3. We have a limit of 22 seconds, and within this time the text that ties the message together needs to have enough time to be legible. The target age group for this PSA is on the older side, so we have to be more generous on the legibility visually, and in terms of time on screen as well.
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Script from GRF+
Script from GRF+
The script shows 3 people showing symptoms (coughing, labored breathing), and their loved one taking notice.
The lines are spoken by the concerned grandson, daughter and son-
"Grampa, you scare me when you cough like a big thunder!"
"Mom, why are you breathing so hard?"
"Dad, does your chest hurt again?"
It ends with the message "Don't ignore the symptoms of lung cancer- detected at an early stage, lung cancer can be treated more easily".
In the storyboard phase, I wanted a camera move up to show the text above the characters,
something to a speech bubble effect.
However, on testing the storyboard on animatic phase, we found there is not enough time for the camera travel. (The brief also changed from having 25 seconds to 22 seconds) So using a simple cut is the most effective, time-saving solution, in the service of clarity.
I edited 3 options of music to the animatic. Despite the fact that animation will not be seen with sound on various web pages, the client would like to have a version that is seen on their own website as well, which allows for music.
Receiving the client's chosen music and previous illustrations I made for their print and web materials as reference, using brand color and font, I made the styleframes in Adobe Illustrator and put them in a boardimatic:
After receiving approval on boardimatic, there was actually not much big decisions left to make, and I could concentrate on what I enjoy most- animating characters' movements in After Effects.
Thank you!