Branding Skills Surgery
The project started with the naming and branding of the project — 'Skills Surgery / Syrjeri Sciliau'. The project is delivered in primary schools across Wales with pupils from 8-11, so all our design work was targeted at that age group. Several ideas were designed but it was agreed that a stylised Stethoscope was the best solution for this target audience.
We delivered several versions of the logo - this one below in full colour, plus a mono white and mono grey version, plus single language versions. There's also an animated version for each video/animation.
Animation 1: Roles in NHS Wales
* We will be showing examples of the animation soon, after the official launch *
Storyboard: The NHS provided us with draft scripts for each of the 3 animations, and then we set about the process of storyboarding. Our first storyboards were presented for feedback, with only minor revisions required by the client. This allowed us to quickly move to the next stage.
Character Design: The main aim of the project is to promote the wide range of roles available (healthcare and otherwise) in NHS Wales, showing young students that NHS Wales is a great potential future employer for them. This first video features a tour of an NHS Wales hospital, meeting various characters along the way who all explain their roles. Our first job then was to create illustrated characters for all roles, with each character needing to be 'riggable' meaning creating a base skeleton with moving joints in order for us to be able to animate each one. We also created a dozen visemes (mouth shapes) in order to get the characters to lip-synch the voiceovers.
The characters include:
- Receptionist
- Security Staff
- Radiographer
- Anaesthetist
- Pharmacist
- Healthcare Support Worker
- Physiotherapist
- Laundry Worker
- Chef
- Counselor
- Drama Therapist
- CEO
Cast of characters for animation 1:
We then had to create the backgrounds, props, furniture etc for each job role prior to beginning the animation. Here are some examples:
Animation 2: Primary Health Care Roles
This animation focused on specific primary health care roles within the NHS. These include Doctors, Nurse Practitioners, Dentists, Orthodontists, Optometrists, Care Navigators, Pharmacists, GPs.
Here are some stills from the animation:
Animation 3: Nye's Story
Nye's story takes us on the journey of Nye, a young boy from Newport who has a scooter accident in the part. The animation follows his journey with the NHS, from the ambulance ride to hospital with the paramedics, to the radiographer x-raying his leg, the pharmacist who prescribes his medicine and the physiotherapist that helps Nye get back to full strength.
Here are a selection of stills from this animation.
BSL (British Sign Language) Version
NHS Wales takes inclusion very seriously, and from the outset required that we produced a BSL - British Sign Language version. We sourced a local BSL Interpreter - Fiona from saronatraining.co.uk who not only offer BSL translation services, but also train BSL translators. The process is a relatively simple one - Fiona is filmed on a greenscreen background, then we key out the green and incorporate Fiona into the animations in post production.
Activity Book
To accompany the animations we've designed a workbook full of activities, puzzles, mazes and quizzes which are all carefully tied in to the school curriculum - and designed to allow different age students to all have a challenge at their level. Here's a selection of the activities in the book.
Merchandise
A team from NHS Wales is traveling around to schools in Wales to show the videos and encourage young students to consider a career in the NHS. The team wanted some gifts to remind the students of the animations, so asked for us to source some merchandise. We settled on Drawstring bags, Notepads, Water Bottles and Badges, all branded with the Skills Surgery logo.
Are you looking for animation design, get in touch.