Big W - Me to We
Talking about mental health in the work place?
It's an infamously hard bridge to cross.
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How do you cross it without potentially burning it once you're on the other side?
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Metaphor.
Getting down from the soap box, we love a bit of character animation around here. It’s these jobs we like to throw ourselves into, they allow us a chance to flex our skills, and have fun at the same time! When Performance Frontiers approached us to work with them on a job for Big W, we were very pleased to see how much animation we could sink our teeth into.
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Working with Performance Frontiers was a wonderful experience, they were very professional and invested in everyone’s success. A real one-two knockout! After briefing through the needs of the project, they supplied us with some wonderful mockups as jumping off points for the videos to come. Suzie was able to develop these mockups into a paper cutout style that was simultaneously economical to animate with, and had a warm appeal that would fit the tone of the videos.
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The aim of these videos was to educate the workers at Big W to be aware of the mental health of their co-workers and themselves, so they can communicate and address their feelings so that everyone feels heard and understood. Each video would address a different challenge such as burnout, stress, and anxiety. All communicated through animals and imagery we would see at the coast and under the sea.
Getting back to our headline on Metaphor. When management staff - in any industry - want to talk about employee well-being to employees; it can very likely come across as detached from the employees' reality, or worse: patronising. Considering the sensitivity of these topics, the tone of these videos would have to range from calm and considered, to fun and goofy. You can see the range of tone we got to play with here.
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One of the best things to come out of this project for us, was seeing the audience response! While we were working on the ‘Self-Care’ video, we received photos from a Big W office showing some of the workers there had made their own character to go along with the videos we had already produced. A purple jellyfish! Seeing that, we had to incorporate it into the next video, having them play a large part in the Self-Care video.
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This was overall a very rewarding project, we’re very proud of what we produced, and we’re exceptionally grateful for Performance Frontiers for choosing to work with us!
