WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK ALCOHOL?

This film is the second in a series of videos commissioned by YouTube and Best For You – a partnership between CW+ and three NHS trusts. It follows the very successful, award-winning first film on eating disorders, which can be viewed here. The films are being created to help make it easier for young people to access high-quality, safe, health information.

The film is aimed at teens and young adults. To ensure it appeals to them it was created from interviews with young people. It covers their experiences of drinking alcohol and includes some friendly peer-to-peer advice. The words were read by actors to protect the identity of the contributors and deliver good voice over performances for the animation.

We expanded upon the naïve hand drawn style and characters that we established in the first film. The intercutting of multiple speakers could be confusing without clear definition of one shot from another so we added a different colour background for each speaker. This helped inject some pace to the edit and kept the whole film colourful and dynamic.

The character designs were kept very simple in the first film. This was partly because we only had one central character and the client didn’t want them to appear to be of one gender or another. They were keen not to suggest that eating disorders were something that only affected women. Representing diversity is always challenging when you don’t have many characters in a film. In this film that wasn’t such a problem because we had a more characters to work with, but the simple, expressive artwork proved to be a real asset. It enabled us to create fun and engaging character animation relatively quickly. The colourful characters and the humorous real-life stories came together with some excellent sound design to create a very effective and engaging film, despite the limited budget.

The writer was Andrew Lane Fox and the film was produced by Sarah Baker of BB Productions. Sound design by Coda Post Production.