live again
• directed • designed • animated •
client
live again x chiltern
produced by
chiltern, live again, fennec pharma,
university of birmingham
sound
zac phillips
voice
synopsis
live again is a support group for children/young adults and their parents who are going and/or went through liver cancer treatment. what i really loved about this project is that peppy, one of the board members had spent most of her life creating a treatment for these families and once she has succeeded, she wanted to create these videos to further assist the patients who were left with one of the most common side effects of liver cancer treatment - hearing loss.
all three animations focus on the different needs and problems these children and young students might face during their life. our goal was to create an inclusive video that kids and teens alike would find relatable and that it would encourage them to start conversations on this topic with their peers and teachers.
the scenarios shown in the videos are all based on real-life stories and experiences
told by some of the treatment survivors and their parents who, at the very beginning, had to figure out everything for themselves (e.g. practising how to lip read on the spelling test in case they get seated at the back of their class).
i enjoy learning new things and being challenged while working on new projects. during the process of creating these animations for live again, i learned that a person with hearing loss could experience their surroundings in a very different way.
my favourite part of portraying some of these issues visually is receiving feedback from people living with hearing loss, saying that after watching the video, they feel like they’re finally being heard.
process/concept
i intended to keep the style of the videos colourful and friendly so that with just a few alterations, they could still be appealing to all three age groups. emerald green is the symbolic colour of liver cancer, so i’ve decided to use it for all the main characters (nursery child - green t-shirt, primary school girl - green bag, secondary school boy - green hair).
i really enjoyed the challenge of squeezing as much helpful information into these short stories as possible. the concept heavily relied on working closely with the sound designer to create some fun yet realistic simulation of how easily our voice can distort when conditions aren’t ideal (e.g. a noisy background or turning away whilst speaking to someone).
'lip sync' is a term used in animation where - simply put - we animate mouth shapes to the dialogue itself. however, the same dialogue can be said with different rhythms, emphasises and tones by each actor, making it a rather complex process. to get the best results, i usually tend to set a mirror next to my screen (to my husband's great amusement), and 'act out' the lines myself, imitating what the actor might have looked like when producing the sounds. this way, i can try to figure out where it is natural to blink, how my face moves or maybe even pay attention to when i pose to take a breath (shoulder movements). in this particular project, it was crucial to get this right because the distortion effect created a simulation where otherwise hearing people could experience what it's like to lip read.
as an extra challenge, the clients received the videos translated into different languages (french, spanish, italian and german) to make all the helpful information even more widely available. in tv productions, re-animating the mouth is quite an unusual practice but since our goal was to keep the lip reading simulation, we eventually decided to do that. not being able to speak most of these languages myself, i had to ask each voice-over actor to take a close-up video of their mouth, so i would understand how a native speaker produces sounds (when do we see the teeth, how the tongue moves, etc.). as a result, i can now say 'children, it's time to sit on the mat!' in at least five different languages, with a good enough accent.
