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University of Leicester


︎ Animation




Ed James Harding
Produced in collaboration with Seed Creativity
https://seedcreativity.co.uk/









Standing Together - Backsto


The University of Leicester received funding from the Office for Students for a university-wide campaign to raise awareness of – and to tackle – sexual violence, hate crime and online harassment. The university’s Department of Criminology asked Seed Creativity to create a short animated film for The Centre of Hate Studies, as part of the campaign. The aim of the film was to help improve student experience by promoting a support network between peers.

As part of the brief, our animation needed a human feel. The first thing that sprung to mind was the classic music video for A-ha’s Take on Me, which used rotoscoping to create the distinctive hand-drawn animation style. With this in mind, the Seed team called on me.






Responding to the brief with great enthusiasm I got to work with co-animator, Herbert Müller to develop the style and storyboard.





Style Experiment II - Rotoscope Head Spin





Style Experiment II - Self Portrait




The storyboarding process

Once the storyboard was finalised, Seed packed up their kit and headed over to the university. Along with some of their students, Seed’s Academy’s YES Media students acted out the storyboard scenarios, and shot video footage to use as a guide for the animation. 








Filming footage for the rotoscoping process


Herb and I then animated over our footage, frame by frame. Seed then booked in a session with the guys over at HQ Recording to make the audio track.

Working with the script developed by Stevie, Neil and Harriet at UoL, They rounded up their actors: Owain Ford, Efaz Ahmed, Kahyeng Chai, and Seed’s own Studio Director, Natalie Squance.

Voiceover complete, the last step was editing it all together – Creative Director Jon Prest worked his magic and produced the final film, with the help of some musical accompaniment from talented pals, Leicester-born duo Demons of Ruby Mae.









The editing process

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The Outcome


The animation, entitled Standing Together, has been used across the university’s social channels, and will distributed around the student networks.

We’re so pleased with the finished short film; it has been refreshing to go back to a more classic style of animation. It was well-received by the university: we’ve received more work off the back of it, and hopefully we’ve done our bit to help their students have a happier time studying!