I animated four explainer videos for the Saxony
Ministry of Justice's website.
For this project, I animated four explainer videos on the topic of
citizen participation in democratic processes for the Ministry of Justice in Saxony - guidelines for funding, Citizens' Council, Citizen Participation, and general guidelines.
All of the explainer videos involved extensive character animation with the stick figures. This meant that I had the opportunity to convey emotion and life using body language since facial expressions were limited. The biggest challenge in this video was animating a skateboard trick at the end!
This video explains how public funding works in Saxony and how, when, and for what citizens can request funding. In this video, we used the example of "Herr Schaffer" ("Mr. Doer") who secures funding for a new skatepark for the youth center where he volunteers.
2
Avenues of Participation for Citizens
This video consists of three mini chapters on different ways that citizens can get involved (direct action like demonstrating, voting, participating in a referendum, attending town hall meetings, or serving on a citizens' advisory board).
This video included a long camera movement combined with a lot of back and forth movements of the smaller stick figures, along with tricky timing with the voiceover. I also challenged myself to make the transitions interesting and engaging rather than relying on simply fading from one scene to another.
This video covers the topic of a Citizens' Council, how one is convened and how citizens can participate.
This video involved a lot of character animation, especially full body character animation, which I often did frame-by-frame. I also made use of Joysticks n' Sliders, which is an incredibly useful Aftereffects plugin, to animate things like the position of the characters' heads.
4
Guidelines for Citizen Participation
This video outlines ways that municipalities can establish "rules of play" for citizens' participation, which detail the processes by which citizens can come together and send their recommendations to elected officials.
The concepts in this video were complicated and somewhat technical, but thanks to our brilliant illustrator, the symbols were very clear. I just needed to make sure the animation and voiceover were synced up in the best way to make the concepts clear to the viewers.