UNIT 19: Arms Around The Child

UNIT 19: Arms Around The Child

Arms Around The Child is a Charity that seeks to provide a loving home, protection and respect for their spirit and soul for orphaned children around the world. The charity drives education for children who are vulnerable, often infected with HIV and orphaned having lost one parent or both. The also intend to provide a sense of community and safety. Arms Around The Child works around the world (Africa and India) to advocate for the needs of these children so that they may grow up with love and care and can look to the future with happiness. The charity will help to educate the general public concerning the causes and effects of distress, hardship and life as an orphan through our direct engagement with the public through events and major campaigns.

'We believe in a future for these kids and intend to do everything we can to make it a bright one. They deserve happiness'

Brief Description: 

The charity, was founded in January 2012 in London but supports children on a worldwide basis. The Charity works to provide a loving home, medical treatment, respect and education for children who have lost their parents or are living in adversity including sexual abuse, neglect and exploitation.

Anyone is able to donate to the charity by texting, this can be done worldwide.

142 million children have been orphaned worldwide, they are affected by many factors such as shame, fear, rejection, denial of basic education and health care, discrimination, Orphans suffer with depression, anxiety, neglect, emotional trauma with little or no support and this often results in exploitation and abuse. Arms Around The Children aims to advance awareness of this horror and through Global media and campaigning they try to engage the public and translate that engagement into action.


The Other Ball: 

The Other Ball is an event set up in support of Arms Around The Child. The Other Ball is an annual London event designed to raise finds to protect children ant risk in India and Africa. During the evening people will come together to transcend the machine lift the spirit to bring hope to these children. Mark Ronson, producer and artist is the Global Ambassador and will host The Other Ball, bringing along some of his enlightened musical friends in a collaboration with musical direct and producer Jeff Bhasker to create a 'magical' experience at the event.

The Other Ball includes guest such as ASAP Rocky, Florence and The Machine, The Black keys, Lily Allen and many more worldwide famous celebrity that give much to the charity and also do the event to raise awareness in publicity.

Social Media: 

Facebook: The Facebook page is there to be able to reach out to a wider audience and be able to be a part of social media. The Facebook page can be there so people are able to research into the charity through the page, look up onto events happening within the charity like The Other Ball. The page also posts quotes, trips and news on there website that people can visit and look into. People can become a part of the charity through Facebook. The page currently has 1,945 likes.

The Charitys twitter works in a similar way to the Facebook, it is there to be able to connect to a wider audience so more people can get involved within the charity. Similar to the Facebook page the twitter will post events and trips that are happening around and for the charity. They retweet people that are supporting the charity and also give links to different pages on the website. The Twitter can help to interact with celebrities and the public who are involved in the charity. The page currently has 1,656 followers.

This next part of work links to the Ethical Designer we studied. We took inspiration from the designs to make our own and join them and make them relate to Arms Around The Child. The research helped me come up with different facts that I could link to pictures and make them into a graphic. Below are the 4 designs that I planned out:- 

The first design on the bottom is an idea that immediately popped into my head. I personally feel this is the most effective design idea out of the four i came up with. I took a lot of inspiration from James Victore's existing artwork firstly I chose the orphan silhouette because it linked directly to the fact that is shown ('3.5 million children are infected with the HIV virus'). The type font was restricted at the time but if I was to choose this design I would possibly changed the fonts and sizes, giving a bit more life and complexity to it. Once again if I chose this design I would alter the colours, instead of black font and white image I wanted to switch this so I had a black image and white font excluding the word HIV as I want this to be red.
My second design once again relates to the fact that is written in the image. Clearly the shape is of a medicine bottle and the fact is '£20 per month helps to provide life saving medicines and treatment for a child'. I had the idea to have a white medicine bottle with black writing apart from the cross shape would be shown through certain words and letters in the writing being a bit lighter. I did think the idea was good however I didn't think it stood out as much and it wasn't so eye catching. 

I didn't want all my design ideas to look the same, so i varied the next two ideas. The top idea was to support stopping trafficking. I wanted to really make this design different and stand out. The idea was to have the typeface in a 'paintbrush' written way  and go gradient from black to red , then from the letter 'T' at the beginning of trafficking have the children again from gradient black to red, running and climbing away from trafficking as though they are trying to get away, and they want it to stop.  The second design was to represent the fact that '5.8 children die of hunger a year', I wanted to make the design for this really powerful. My idea was to have at top top of the poster a silhouette a collection of food or perhaps food shopping, then underneath the fact 'falling' from the picture, but joined onto it. Then once again beneath that, the children in silhouette reaching up and trying to get to the food, but they cant quite reach - this all on top of a red background.

So I decided on doing my first design, and I had different ways that I wanted to do this, my first idea was to have the writing of the fact in black 'paintbrush' like writing filling up the shape of the orphan, so there wasnt actually an outline of them but the writing would make it look as if there was. My over idea of how to go about this was to have the orphan painted in black as if it was a silhoueete then have white writing on top of it, in different fonts and sizes. I decided to go with the second idea as I think it related more to James Victores designs, below is how I did this:-

The first thing I had to do was create the silhouette of the 'orphan'. I done this by tracing an image onto a A3 sized paper so it was big and clear enough to type onto on the later steps. I thought the best way to get the clearest black was to paint it, therefore I used water colours and went over a few coats to get this really strong black colour.

 

The next step I had to take was to transfer the picture of my painting into Adobe Illustrator where i'd be able to begin putting in the text. After putting the picture into Illustrator, I firstly cropped it down so that the table round the outside was not visible. And as I wanted to make the black colour a lot stronger, I used the Levels - Curves tool to alter the contrast and brightness making it look full white background and dark black image. The I then began to insert fonts, I found two fonts on dafont.com that I thought suited great to this graphic and to match James Victore style of work. The two fonts I used were called 'Levi Brushed' which is the one that looks like a painting and 'So Thin' which is obviously the smaller one - i thought the contrast of the small thin font and bold large font worked really well and made the image stand out but not look to compact. Finally I added the Arms Around The Child Logo round the bottom so people knew what the image was representing. Below is my final outcome!...

Ethical Designing GIF 

As part of the Ethical Designing we began creating a GIF that will reach out to the people and notify of the problem going on out in India and Africa and why Arms Around The Child are helping. We had to include how people can help and a fact about the charity all through different images and typeface making it look creative, enticing and appealing therefore catching someones eye if it was an advert. 

From my previous research and design ideas I had already plenty of ideas of what I wanted to achieve in my design. I created a storyboard which helped me get the general idea of how I wanted the GIF to go, I included the colours and font ideas in this part so that it was easier for me to do the GIF quicker and avoid looking through all sorts of fonts. Below os my storyboard: 

The first half of my storyboard is shown above. I decided to go with the quote '5.8 million children die of hunger related illness every year'. Not only is this a touching fact but I thought that it would be great to represent in a GIF form. I wanted to accentuate the most important parts of the fact therefore I made the writing more noticeable and planned to do these in striking colours such as reds, blues and blacks. I also linked images in the GIF to the words appearing for example the world and the child sitting is representing the children dying all around the world due to hunger - this makes the GIF more powerful and moving. The 'ILLNES EVERY YEAR' I wanted to make the most striking, it is part of the GIF that shocks people the most therefore it needed to be the main part of the GIF, I planned to change the fonts on each word to make it more interesting and creative. 

This is the final part of my GIF, just the last word of the fact and the question 'is this ok with you' and the arms around the child website at the bottom so people know where that can help. 

After planning the story board, I began to transfer all my ideas  into InDesign. The first thing I done is gather all the fonts I planned to use. To do this I used dafont.com - the website has a great selection of fonts that helped me achieve the style I wanted which was bold, sticking, thick but also looked rather good. The first part of the gif was the '5.8 Million' - I looked for bold writing for 5.8, as it was the beginning of the GIF I wanted it to stand out and catch peoples eye. For the The million I began with just having it in the colour green however I thought it looked more striking and with the black behind it, this alms gave it a 3D look. This can be seen below. 

I continued to do the same sort of thing for the next part of the animation, using dafont to collect the perfect fonts and experimenting with how I wanted them to look. This can be seen below. 

For this section of the GIF I had originally started with a image of hand I got from google images however I then had the idea to create my own. I done this by painting my hand in a white colour and putting it on a pink piece of paper, this created the whole of my hand including the details in a white colour. I done this multiple times to get the best outcome. I then scanned in the best print I had, put the image in black and white, got rid of the background and then made it so that I could change the colour of the hand - resulting in what is seen above. 

After i finished designing the fonts and layout etc, transferred all my designs into Photoshop and began making the final GIF to do this I first -

Below is the final GIF, put together and moving: 

What are your influences from artist & designers?

After researching into James Victore's work I had a strong idea of what I wanted to create. Personally I loved his work and the  designs that he has produced as they have a certain originality about them and a look that kind of resembled that they were done quickly but the final outcome was a masterpiece.  I tried to apply this to my work as much as possible, despite the fact I wanted it to look professional and put together, I took inspiration mostly from the fonts he has previously used. These being the messy, freehand/handwriting inspired designs. As you can from my GIF, multiple parts words have the same messy, freehand look. I feel as though this gives the design on a whole a more authentic feel, similar to James Victore's work. 

Any areas to improve?

I think the thing I need to improve on the most is the layout of the elements in the GIFi.e the text, pictures. I had an idea in my mind of what  wanted but it changed a bit throughout the process of making the actual animation as I didn't take into considerations some things like the size of the writing or the picture sizes etc therefore this part took me longer. So next time I would plan ahead more and know that the storyboard of my animation might change throughout creating so i can be prepared for this. 

How successful is your final outcome? 

I'm really pleased with my final outcome. I think all of it works well including the fonts, the colours and the pictures etc and it send out the message that I wanted to perfectly (not to serious but still hard hitting to) I also feel it appeals to all kinds of audiences which is good for getting the message of the GIF recognised. The completed animation flows well and its definetly not to slow nor to fast, it's easy to read with the bold, colourful fonts which is exactly what I had in mind when I was doing the storyboard. Overall I think the final outcome is even better then what I expected. 

Does it reflect the ethical theme?

I believe that the principal message and ethical theme of the animation is sent out perfectly. Like previously said the message is sent out in a way that would appeal to a younger audience and also an older audience therefore the seriousness of the GIF is recognised by all people. The animation is bold and creative and I personally feel the natural colours for example the blues, greens etc keep the ethical theme strong. As well as this, the pictures for example the earth and hands both look quite rough and sketch like which I feel looks quite cultural. The praying child also puts out a strong message as it is quite hard hitting and shows desperation. 

Would you approach future projects differently?

I wouldn't approach future projects different. I think I took enough time to plan my animation so that when it came to actually creating it I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and could do it with ease. I learnt a lot whilst creating the animation in particular with inDesign and I am pleased with the final outcome.