Oxford University · animated explainer & key visuals

Role | Direction, design, lead animation, compositing & production

Young Lives is a research project from Oxford University, following 12.000 children, across 4 countries and 15 years, who are growing up in poverty.

Oxford University needed an outreach tool to help create engagement among stakeholders and policy makers, to create lasting impact.
This animation is that - an introduction to the project, highlighting some of the many, many findings the team has discovered over the years.

The animation project was designed to be a kind of trailer; an intro into an immensely dense accumulation of knowledge.
To fully represent the scope of the study, it was important to show realistic characters of different ages from different countries, while still keeping it engaging, light and open to a not-in-the-know audience.
In collaboration with Young Lives, we decided to weave the stories together, creating a tapestry of different destinies, in order to tell both many individual stories and the one overall story - of poverty.

The animation was designed to be used on multiple channels: First at a conference, where it would premiere, later online and finally on screens in the lobby of the main office.

Script · Young Lives
Additional production · Anastasia Bow-Bertrand
Additional animation · Matias Morel Balbi
Music & sound design · Astrid Lund
Speak · Freya Møller-Sørensen