Animation director, Jacquie Trowell has created and successfully delivered multimedia content for a major Eastern and Southern African Handwashing Campaign.
According to a major international children’s educational fund, 20 per cent of deaths in infants and children under the age of five in Malawi are due to diarrhea, of which poor hand-washing practices is a major contributor. This prompted a campaign to teach children and their caregivers the importance of washing their hands at key times.
The challenge: the entire project had to be completed within 3 months, including production design, script, music, voice recording and all approvals, and the costs had to be low enough to be feasible for the non-profit organization’s limited budget.
Director Jacquie Trowell’s extensive experience with writing and directing material for Sesame Street helped her to win the national tender for Firefly Pictures. “My main aim in designing the content for the campaign was to wrap a vital message in great entertainment. We had one character, a bar of soap called Sopo, and the message – wash your hands at 4 critical times a day. From that needed to come three television spots including a live action interview with Yvonne Chaka Chaka, a twelve minute film, a jingle, four radio spots and mobile phone content. I needed great music, strong copy and high-end character animation so I chose Su Lubner, Meg Rickards and Triggerfish Animation as the core creative team.”
“We decided on a simple but fun style of animation, to lower animation overhead but to still be engaging for kids to watch,” says Triggerfish’s production manager Mike Buckland. “By using fast, energetic posing and longer holds, we were able to get the animators to deliver an average of 5 seconds a day – which is fantastic for this quality production.” The funders wanted to create an African peri-urban setting, so the animators had to create crowd scenes and various characters. In total the production consisted of 25 different characters.
“We specialize in narrative driven character animation, so this production was right up our street, but the budget point and hectic delivery schedule posed some challenges for our 13-seat studio,” says Triggerfish producer Stuart Forrest. “In the end the production went amazingly smoothly, thanks largely to Jacquie’s experience and strong direction.”
Scriptwriter Meg Rickards had a week to write the script in which we follow the adventures of Sopo and the local children as Sopo raises awareness amongst his young friends of the importance of washing your hands with soap. “It was an impossible time-frame, but it was certainly rewarding to see the script animated and completed within a few months,” says Meg. “Usually it takes years to see the fruit of your work on screen!”
Original music was composed by Su Lubner. “I had worked with Su before on Takalani Sesame”, says Jacquie. “She has loads of experience in embedding educational messages in localized music. My design for the campaign’s content hinged on a song. It needed catchy music and words that were easy to remember. With help from Meg on lyrics, Su really came up with a great and memorable song – we all sang it throughout the production.”
All material had to be delivered in both English and Chichewa as the campaign launches in Malawi. “Producing the Chichewa language components presented unexpected problems,” says producer, Leigh Page. “In between quoting and commencing the production South Africa underwent the xenophobic onslaught. This resulted in the well of potential Malawian talent literally drying up over night; so we ended up having to import talent from Malawi for the Chichewa versions.” Voice over recordings and sound design were done by Stash Couvaris. “It was quite a challenge matching the Chichewa voices to picture. The animated characters were lip synched to the English track so we had to really work the Chichewa to fit well with picture. Luckily we had the help of language advisors so we could drop words and rephrase parts of the script.”
“Thanks to Leigh and the dedication of the creative team, the end product looks fantastic, gets the message clearly across and is great fun to watch”, says Jacquie. “I think as animators and filmmakers we’ll always go that extra mile for education in the hope that we make a difference to children’s lives.”
Triggerfish Animation has completed a 14-minute episode of an exciting new children's series entitled Me and Jessie D for Studio 125, a production company based in Alabama.The episode, entitled Fish Fry, is the second in the series which follows the antics of a group of animal friends living in the swamps of the deep South. Although the show is rich in idiosyncratic Southern culture, the US producers were delighted with the South African team's interpretation of the expressions and body language of the eleven different characters.
The decision to produce in South Africa is part of a growing trend as international producers recognise the coming-of-age of the fledgling SA animation industry. With the sliding Rand and high production values for low cost, South African animation companies are quickly becoming more attractive to overseas producers.
In 2007 Triggerfish produced 30-minutes of animation for the direct-to-DVD film The Rise and Fall of Tony the Frog, an episode in a successful children's animation franchise, Life at the Pond. The DVD has been widely seen in the US and has set a benchmark standard for South African low cost animation, which directly led to the commissioning of Me and Jessie D.
“Because we are the new kids on the block, we have a brand new way of managing our production pipeline which is unencumbered by traditional top-heavy production techniques,” says Stuart Forrest, producer at Triggerfish. “We’ve been able to concentrate most of the funding on the actual animation, and have stripped away layers of management and committee decision-making. We’ve also developed our own in-house management software which is specifically tailored to our workflow - so approvals, revisions and renders are smoothly handled with maximum efficiency.”
Triggerfish currently has a feature film in script development, and one set to go into production later this year. “Our long term strategy is to create our own content and export South African animated features to the world,” says Forrest. “We want to show the world a different side to South Africa filmmaking – one that is specifically child friendly and therefore has universal appeal.”
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The global animation industry is worth US$60 billion a year*, and it is growing steadily as demand for family entertainment increases. "The US client has been extremely happy with the final product," says Triggerfish producer Stuart Forrest. "We're expecting this to open a lot of doors for South Africa to service other foreign programming."
Ambient Animation, the South African producers of the DVD, outbid US and New Zealand companies who had produced previous episodes of the series, Life at the Pond. Triggerfish Animation was then hired as a service provider to create the full episode. Triggerfish has a long history in servicing US animation, having produced animation for nearly a decade for preschool education giant, Sesame Street.
With large commissions like these, there is an increasing demand for experienced animators. With the support of the Cape Film Commission, who see animation as a key area of focus, Triggerfish put together a training program alongside the project to maximize the value of the film for the company and the local industry.
www.lifeatthepond.com
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