Animated storytelling for social justice

We recently volunteered our time to help a local charity group Community Centred Knowledge (CCK) with animated content for their upcoming website.

Community Centred Knowledge (CCK) is a collective that places the perspectives, experiences, and goals of people of African and Caribbean heritage at the centre of its focus. They create immersive group workshops and presentations on topics related to social transformation, social justice, environmental justice & anti-colonial campaigns, working alongside universities, museums, and grassroots communities, such as the Bristol Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Racial Justice Network in Leeds.  

Entirely volunteer-based and self-funded, the CCK needed help to make existing video content into more interesting visual narratives that are engaging and impactful.

We helped CCCK do this, by rotoscoping video content for their new website. In case you didn't know, rotoscoping is a long-used technique in film and tv production that involves tracing over live-action footage frame by frame to create a realistic animated sequence. It's the sort of thing that A.I. could be almost good at, but at the time we couldn't find a service to beat the old fashioned hand-drawn method (A.I. has come along way since). Many humbling hours and podcasts later we overlaid our hand drawn frames with the original footage and created a painterly look giving the videos some much needed character.

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