Mental health is a hard topic to explain, especially to adolescents who are navigating the complexities of growing up. That’s where adolescent animation comes in! By using colorful characters and engaging stories, animation makes these important discussions accessible and enjoyable for young minds. In this article, let’s discover how ShinShin Tang approached animated videos and used them to teach mental health concepts to kids aged 11 to 13.
Ms. ShinShin Tang – Creator of Child Mental Health Training Project
At our very first start, Ms. ShinShin Tang contacted us to propose her incubated mental health training project for adolescence-centric between 11 – 13 years old, as her lasting captures on educational perspective and projects F. Learning Studios have worked on.
Shin Shin holds a Ph.D. in psychology. She has rich experience in wide areas of psychological care and helps different people address their inner problems and stand up boldly, and happily. But to this training project, her approach must be different because her objects are very sensitive and vulnerable, and about to go through physical and mental ‘evolution’.
The Problem
Shin Shin’s targeted object is nowhere but very ‘sensitive’ adolescents, those born at the end of Gen Z – the gate of Gen Alpha: the onset age of puberty, living in the U.S, learning in a bit ‘chaotic’ public schools, where mental health education was not properly focused. There was a fact that even their folks and intimate teachers confessed they had never been trained properly on such ‘psychology’ subjects, it’s reasonably not having enough confidence to sort out their students’ turbulent emotions, strange and neither – understand- why behaviors.
Such a challenge has been imposed, Shin Shin reflected on her next mission, giving herself an opportunity to educate adolescent children to positively face both physical and psychological chaos within themselves, and pass her expertise knowledge on teaching mental health to their daily teachers on the Child Mental Health Training Project.
“Why adolescent animation? The reason was pretty simple and couldn’t be more suitable: Kids love cartoons. Let’s use cartoon then”
She was right, we used to be kids who grew up seeing animation, it’s so dearly and feel-like-home, let alone lovable, simple, and warm-felt, which considerably impacts the outcome of psychology training.
However, all the floating mental health adolescence cartoons she found on the internet were either too dry or delivered inaccurate information, which can never satisfy her. She sought a studio with tailored adolescent animation to really capture her vision in terms of what the animation for mental health training looks like and share the same value on education.
The Solution
After comprehending her problem, we offer her a friendly, delightful but educationally effective ‘visual plan’, that impacts directly on students’ emotions. Shin Shin never thinks of animation as a touching medium and amazing “1 picture worth 1000 words conveying”. This is because adolescent animation not only touches the eyes but ears, therefore, it’s the most efficient training ware for her project. After seeing the reel, she was totally impressive. F Learning Studio’s animations are small, but it works.
By far, she was persuaded by our expertise knowledge, and experience. (shown in prior educational animation projects), and very competitive pricing, F.learning Studio – can never be a more perfect match! Shin Shin was paired up with F.Learning Studio to design a mental health training course using character animations.
“F. Learning Studio helped me see the usefulness and potential of educational animation that I couldn’t find from what I have seen. I liked the way the company shows their expertise and passion for education on their website, both from the blogs and previous works.
Moreover, the price was very competitive when it came to tailor-made animation services.”
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The Actual Process
Step 1. Wrote an impressive animation script
“I had no idea about animation before. The producer of F. Learning Studio has directly contacted me and helped me a lot in writing an animation script. He supported me to deliver the information needed delicately but also make the script be able to do the illustration and animation effectively .”
– Shin Shin.
F.learning Studio has supported ShinShin in writing the script that turns her lessons into an engaging story that is ready for adolescent animation. We knew that not everyone was a player in writing an animation script, it should have taken from both the in-depth narrative knowledge and understanding of animation. Therefore, working with the producers of F. Learning Studio was truly beneficial for ShinShin because it helped to avoid misunderstandings or errors in the motion pictures that occurred because of scriptwriting.
Step 2. Figured out a beautiful style frame
It was where the magic happens! To encourage children, regardless of their gender, to identify with any of the characters in the animated series, Shinshin wanted to use monsters as the main characters in teaching mental health. And she found that F.Learning Studio has really captured this through the attractive designs we offered. In the process of designing the style frame, F. Learning Studio:
- Drew out ideas and turned them into beautiful mental health cartoon images
- Provided 3 options, including character design, color, background, and font.
Notably, Shin Shin highly appreciated that we provided 3 options for her to choose from. Because 3 is a number that professional studios usually offer for clients you can’t find it when working with freelancers.
Step 3. Created the storyboards
One more exclusive experience in the production process was checking the storyboard. Creating a storyboard was part of a hard job. It served as a visualized version of the script that included everything children were going to see on the screen.
ShinShin was offered to see after every step of the process: from sample to full storyboard. She was also a member of the production team. Moreover, she always felt assured as the studio was able to make quick changes according to her revisions of each step.
Step 4. Involved in the illustration process
After the storyboard, the team moved on to illustration. In a nutshell, it was to draw carefully every scene in the storyboard with the chosen style frame. It was not as difficult as designing the style frame, but it took lots of time and required the illustrators to be very careful and precise.
“F.learning Studio still offered me to make the revision when doing illustration. It made me feel the professional and premium quality of the end-to-end service that the studio provides.”
ShinShin.
Step 5. Designed and executed an awesome animation series
Went from knowing nothing about animation to owning an animation series, it’s very magnetic! ShinShin has successfully made an interesting lesson about mental problems for children with a creative teaching aid, its educational animation.
The outcome
After completing the first part of the animation series, ShinShin ran its trials in some health lessons. Although the project is still under preparation, it has achieved some impressive results.
It really works!
The children were actually watching the videos and paying attention! And after watching the animated video, teachers felt it useful and interesting to explain what they couldn’t understand before.
It goes viral!
Besides letting students watch it, ShinShin also published the animation on YouTube. What a pleasant surprise! The video has reached 5000 people without any advertising or promotion. It shows that the video has natural value and it really attracts the viewers!
The tailor-made animated videos that F. Learning Studio produced for Shin Shin have done a great job of:
▶️ Effectively explain mental health knowledge
This new and delicate topic naturally is hard for both children and adults to understand.
▶️ Creatively train teachers
It’s where the ‘teaching by learning’ strategy goes success. Now with adolescent animation, the teachers can learn about children’s problems first, then find a better way to teach their students what they’ve learned.
▶️ Tactfully teach students
Animations help to deliver sensitive and difficult knowledge to adolescent children by engaging characters and funny tones that students love to watch!
▶️ Potentially distributed worldwide:
With animated videos, ShinShin could easily transform this on-campus syllabus into an online course and deliver over the world to more children.
In conclusion
By leveraging the engaging and relatable nature of adolescent animation, ShinShin Tang’s innovative approach not only captures the attention of adolescents but also fosters a deeper understanding of their emotional well-being. If you would like to experience the transformative power that animation can bring to your education content, contact us now for a FREE consultation.
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