Building on Success

Last year we chose Caritas Salford as our charity partner. to work with and support their work in helping deal with homelessness across Greater Manchester and Lancashire? The “Bee There” campaign saw levels of generosity which exceeded expectations by raising double what they saw the previous year. 

This success was against the odds with the country facing a cost-of-living crisis after the pandemic. The incredible support and generosity received has helped Caritas to carry out their vital work in communities across Greater Manchester and Lancashire

At the beginning of the year, Caritas invited us to work with them again and in response we have worked alongside them in partnership to create a follow-up campaign, built on the success of #BeeThere which we’re delighted to say includes the return of our animated bees!

For the 2023 “Big Dreams come from Small Change” campaign, we’ve evolved from last year’s narrative explainer approach, now looking to the voices of children to identify why it’s important to dream.

The Childrens’ Voice

To better understand the types of problems faced by those who are struggling in our society, we read about work done by American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who developed a theory of the universal needs that every person has - such as love, connection, and safety - and how these basic needs aren't met for many people in our area.

We asked the children participating about their dreams - and then about those who might dream about their basic needs being met. 

The children weren’t primed and knew very little about the campaign aspirations, we just wanted to know what they thought and they didn’t hold back!

“Maybe you could like, um, give some food to help them, make them feel good about themselves.”

“Say positive things about them,  like “you're really kind and beautiful.”

“Yeah, it's not that hard.”

Designing new, younger bees!

For the 2023 campaign we needed to go back to the drawing board with the bees that we created for last year. We wanted them to look younger (not just smaller), we needed more visible variety to make them identifiable and most importantly to increase the complexity of their animation rigs to build in more expressions and speech.

We started with sketches to get their proportions right and built out from there - generally this meant bigger heads and eyes but also adding in props, clothing and haircuts to ensure they all felt individual.

From dresses and stickers to mops of hair and footballs (even a broken arm) each of the children was styled to reflect the personality and words that they each brought to the interviews.

Animation

From here we took the new animation rigs (that’s what we call the controls each character has been given to help them perform) and brought the characters to life as they were lip-synced to the audio recordings.

It was decided relatively early on that visualising dreams would be a great way to bring the interviews to life even more, so we created some short 2D animations to punctuate some of the concepts that the children came up with - I mean how can you miss the opportunity to show an island full of puppies or a water-slide from a block of flats!! 

Locations

Caritas Salford support people all across Greater Manchester and Lancashire and we wanted to give a nod to some locations that our audience might recognise or feel an affinity with. They also needed to work on a macro level, because our camera operators needed to feel like they were around an inch tall. 

With the background plates filmed, all that was required to finish the shots was to match the lighting and reflections, then composite the bees in using a combination of HDR 360 photography, 3D lighting and multi-layered renders from our animation software.

Here’s one of the finished shots

We hope you enjoy watching this campaign as much as we did making it, once again it has been a great privilege to work alongside a charity that does so much good for our amazing city and if you can, please support them - after all “Big Dreams come from Small Change!”

Head over to www.caritassalford.org.uk/beethere