WHAT ARE EATING DISORDERS? - CASE STUDY

This film is the first in a series of 20 videos commissioned by YouTube about specific mental health conditions. It has been created to help make it easier for young people to access high-quality, safe, health information. This film was produced by BB Productions as part of Best For You – a partnership between CW+ and three NHS trusts.

The film is aimed at teens and young adults. It explains what an eating disorder is and how you can get help if you think you might have one.

We began by sharing some animation references to try to get a sense of the kind of film the client was looking for. After narrowing that down we designed some style frames in a couple of different styles.

The client was keen to appeal to a wide audience so they wanted to avoid stereotypes around gender or body size and shape. They were also wary of showing anything that could be triggering. They wanted us to make the imagery more abstract and use metaphors to focus more on feelings. We decided to reduce the representations of food down to simple shapes and mirror those shapes in the character designs.

The client loved them and thought they would help show all of the invisible stuff behind an eating disorder in a simple but impactful way. Using simple shapes helped overcome the problem of the central character having a specific gender, body size or skin colour. However, we also chose to address the diversity issue more directly by adding a line to the beginning of the film.

We were concerned that by making things too abstract we risked losing the young audience. To address this, we planned the visuals for each shot carefully to ensure the meaning was clear. At the animation stage we added as much facial expression and body language as we could with such simple characters. This helped to convey emotion and draw the viewer into the story.

The writer was Andrew Lane Fox and the film was produced by Sarah Baker of BB Productions.