Bring your edge: Next Generation Graduates Program

It was fantastic to work with CSIRO, to tell this story about our national science agency’s new graduate research training program for AI, quantum and emerging technology. We created the animation from end-to-end, including discovery meetings, script, illustrations, voice over and post-production. The entire production process was conducted remotely. To find out more about Next Gen, feel free to visit: Student information – CSIRO

Improving childhood asthma management in Melbourne’s inner west

We were delighted to work with the Department of Health Victoria on this important topic. We created the animation from end-to-end, including discovery meetings, script, illustrations, voice over and post-production. The entire production process was conducted remotely. The animation highlights the great work of many clinicians, organisations and people in the community, all seeking to improve the management of childhood asthma in Melbourne’s west. To find out more about the initiative, feel free to visit: Improving childhood asthma management in Melbourne’s inner west | health.vic.gov.au

‘Beating Hearts of Australia’: Rural & Regional Maternity Services

Improving regional health in Australia is a topic that matters a lot to me. So, it was a privilege to work with RANZCOG and create this animation to highlight how Rural Maternity Services are the foundation for healthy, prosperous, and growing rural communities. RANZCOG has used this animation widely, including during a visit to Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra. Animations can be a great way to get a key audience up to speed on your point of view and then springboard to conversations, discussions, or actions. RANZCOG is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to high standards of practice in obstetrics and gynaecology. To find out more, please visit: Excellence In Women’s Health – RANZCOG

Tackling everyday sexism in the workplace? It starts with us.

This animation was one of our most important and impactful pieces of work in recent years. As Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO is solving the greatest challenges through innovative science and technology. We worked closely with CSIRO Diversity & Inclusion team to create this unique animation that outlines why everybody has a responsibility to address everyday sexism in the workplace. This video explains what sexism looks like in the workplace and the impact it has on both staff and the organisation. We created the animation from start to finish: from discovery, script, illustrations, filming in the studio, voice over and right through to post-production. 

Developing a love of early learning: Tamworth’s HIPPY Program

Working with TFSS, a family support service based in northern NSW, was incredibly rewarding. We created a snappy animation to explain the value of HIPPY: a free two-year education program for children aged 3 and 4. The program helps parents lay the foundations for success at school by teaching their child literacy, numeracy and language skills, and physical motor skills. Working remotely from our team studios, we created the key components of animation including discovery meetings, script, illustrations, and post-production. The magic twist? TFSS organised the voice over using voices from the local community, which we think added authenticity, interest and impact. For more information on TFSS: please visit: Home – TFSS

Are you having ‘the conversation before the conversation’ in your family business?

Together with leadership consultant, Lee Williams from Infinity Leadership, we recently launched a new service called ‘The Conversation before the Conversation’. Healthy conversations are vital within every family business and our new service offers clients a facilitated and creative workshop to kick start these types of important conversations before the more formal conversations, processes and procedures begin with official advisors. Starting conversations early on and picturing the way ahead in a family business can help save on time, emotions, and costs later. We created this animation from end-to-end to bring to life our value proposition in a sharp, impactful and eye-catching way. To find out more about the service and what clients get out of each workshop, please visit: The Conversation Before the Conversation – Guy Downes and Lee Williams (cb4c.life)

Helping ABTA’s vision of safer births, better healing

THINKNATAL is an online platform from ABTA (the Australasian Birth Trauma Association). It’s filled with educational resources aimed at providing support and information on a variety of topics that are often excluded or underrepresented in existing antenatal education. Working closely with ABTA, we were delighted to support this initiative by developing short and unique educational animations on a wide range of key topics. The static images of the animation drawings were also repurposed as posters and fliers. Here are a few animation examples below, more can be found at thinknatal – Birth Trauma

• Talk About Change: Recovering After A Vaginal Birth Talk About Change – Recovering After A Vaginal Birth (youtube.com)
• The Road Forward: Recovering After A Caesarean Birth The Road Forward – Recovering From A Caesarean Birth – YouTube
• Into The Know: Informed Birthing & Assisted Vaginal Births: ThinkNatal – Into the Know -Informed Birthing & Assisted Vaginal Births (youtube.com)
• The Pelvic Floor: What It Is & What it Does: ABTA ThinkNatal Module Two: The Pelvic Floor, Part 1 – YouTube

Building on understanding of and responses to domestic, family, and sexualised violence

Since late 2020, we have been honoured to work with the team at Insight Exchange developing a wide range of unique animations (in both English and Spanish) that combine hand-drawing, voice overs, sound design and creative post production techniques. Each unique animation has been developed to build on understanding of and responses to domestic, family and sexualised violence. In nearly fours years, we’ve created over 20 animations, and you can browse them here: Animations and Videos – Insight Exchange

Insight Exchange centres on the expertise of people with lived experiences of violence and gives voice to these experiences. It is designed to inform and strengthen social, service and systemic responses to domestic and family violence. For more information, visit: www.insightexchange.net

Follow My Lead: informing and supporting responses to domestic and family violence

Are you thinking about how you respond to someone you know who might be experiencing domestic and family violence? If so, check out this short video animation based on Follow My Lead – an Insight Exchange Foundation awareness-raising resource.

We were honoured to recently support the work of Insight Exchange by bringing to life this important resource as a short, impactful and engaging animation.

Follow My Lead speaks from the voice of people with lived experience of Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) who need the professionals and their social networks to be more prepared to respond effectively; more prepared to respond in ways that uphold dignity and build on safety. Follow My Lead is for any person who at some point may be listening to and responding to their friends, family members, colleagues, peers or to the people who use their service, who are experiencing DFV.

Insight Exchange has been established, developed and is governed by registered charity Domestic Violence Service Management (DVSM).

Helping business owners to seed, weed and lead!

Working closely with Brainbox Marketing, I recently created a short animation for Alan Green Business Coaching. The purpose of the animation was to connect with Alan’s prospective clients and help them better understand how and why he can help their business. Alan’s passion is to help business owners weed out bad practices, seed new growth and lead their teams to success. In only 60 seconds, we brought to life a short and sharp story packed with animation and effects. It was great collaborating with Brainbox Marketing who look after Alan Green’s marketing. Brainbox developed an engaging script with memorable messaging and organised the voiceover. Based in Melbourne, Brainbox works with businesses across Australia providing reliable and smart marketing services.

Commenting on the project, Michelle Le Cornu, Director, Brainbox Marketing, said: “Guy was a pleasure to work with. He quickly grasped what Alan was trying to say about his business and how I wanted to tell a story via the video from a marketing and comms perspective. In fact, he took our brief to the next level with his ideas and creativity. Guy delivered a high quality product on time, on budget and proactively communicated throughout the project. I thought his work was great but more importantly, my client was tickled pink with the result. I’ve already engaged Guy on another project and will continue to work with him.”

A race against time: an animation about cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in Australia for over 40 years – and yet most of these deaths are preventable. With rising chronic disease and obesity rates, heart disease is an increasingly urgent concern for Australians. It’s a race against time to prevent these unnecessary deaths. We must do things differently – but how? Dynamic simulation modelling can help.

This was another rewarding project that we worked on with Amgen and the Sax Institute to create a premium-style video scribe animation to share the story and outputs of their systems modelling work around the topic of cardiovascular disease in Australia.

Using a Sketch Speak visualisation process, we worked with their multi-disciplinary team and initially ran a Story Mapping Workshop that helped the team to articulate key messages in a short and engaging story arch. Using our facilitator, Jarrod Siegertsz, the workshop delivered a creative, rigorous and fast-paced half day shared team experiences where ideas could be shared and voices could be heard. Post workshop, our writer, Paul Armstrong, pulled together the voice over script and working closely with my film and production team, we crafted the video scribe animation based on my illustration and storyboard ideas.

The final animation included hand-drawing, voice over, digital and sound effects as well as sound tracks. To see the best results, view this animation on full screen with the volume turned up.

What if? An animation about Osteoporosis & Bone Health

Around 6.3 million Australians have poor bone health, and many don’t even realise it. Dealing with these fractures costs us $3 billion per year, and a lot of distress. So how can we help stop it before it happens? Systems modelling gives us a dynamic window to the future, so we can work out what strategies will have the best impact.

On this important project, we worked with Amgen and the Sax Institute to create a premium-style video scribe animation to share the story and outputs of their systems modelling around bone health in Australia. The animation included hand-drawing, voice over (supplied by the client), digital and sound effects as well as sound tracks. To see the best results, view this animation on full screen with the volume turned up.

Using a Sketch Speak visualisation process, we worked with their multi-disciplinary team and ran a Story Mapping Workshop that helped them to articulate key messages in a short and engaging story arch. Using our facilitator, Jarrod Siegertsz, the workshop delivered a creative, rigorous and fast-paced half day shared team experience where ideas could be shared and tested and voices could be heard. Post workshop, our writer, Paul Armstrong, pulled together the voice over script and working closely with my film and production team, we crafted the video scribe animation based on illustration and storyboard ideas.

Sharing an important story with school leaders

Leading a school can be a hectic, varied, unpredictable and rewarding role – so getting new information out to principals and other leaders can be a tough job. That’s why the NSW Department of Education’s EDConnect team turned to us recently to create a short and sharp video scribe animation to help connect their busy school leaders with some new developments. We worked closely with the EDConnect team to write the script, develop the final video scribe animation and provide the audio recording (‘voice over’). Working with the Department on such an important story was a highly rewarding experience.

The aim of the hand drawn video scribe animation was to grab the attention of school leaders and to raise their awareness of Scout – an online system that provides access to key data and reports that can help them with important school information about things like finance and human resources. These reports can help school leaders to navigate their operational environment, stay up-to-date and make decisions more quickly and effectively.

A vital ingredient for a great video scribe animation is a great script. We offer clients the opportunity to work with our scriptwriter, Paul Armstrong. Paul is an accomplished writer, actor and corporate facilitator with a fantastic ability to discover the critical elements of the story a client needs to tell, and then distil these into an engaging, relevant, digestible and creative story. His skills don’t end there – Paul also jumped into the recording studio to provide the voice over for this animation. For more information on Paul’s work, visit: www.paulmichaelarmstrong.net

The importance of the capturing the nursing process in the digital environment

One of my latest video scribe animations is a premium product developed for a team from the Synergy Nursing and Midwifery Research Centre and Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra (ACT, Australia). Titled “The importance of the capturing the nursing process in the digital environment”, we worked closely with Dr. Kasia Bail, Associate Professor in Nursing, to create an engaging, fast paced premium style animation that involved significant planning and extensive filming and post production work to add relevant and compelling effects.

Launched at a recent Australian Association of Gerontology conference, this premium video scribe animation was designed as an educational tool to help nurses explain their practice and decision making in team discussions with project managers and IT teams designing health information systems. The video scribe animation might also be informative for nursing students, consumers, or anyone else interested in how to make health systems work more effectively for the needs of people who happen to be patients. This was an extremely rewarding project to work on and many thanks to Dr. Kasia Bail for picking up the phone and getting us involved.

The animation recently got a great write up in Nursing Review, which is Australia’s only independent nursing print and digital content provider. Titled “More than chit-chat: demystifying nurse-patient interactions” the articles gives a great explanation to the reasoning behind the animation. There’s also a really good 9 minute podcast within the article where Dr Kasia Bail describes how this project came about and how it’s being used. Here’s the link: nursingreview.com.au/2019/02/more-than-chit-chat-demystifying-nurse-patient-interactions/

IPAA shares the story about Federation reform

Federation reform can be complicated. In the lead up to the 2015 IPAA National Conference, I worked with the IPAA team to create a 2 minute video scribe animation to help people get informed about this fast evolving area as well as raise awareness about the event. The Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) is the nationwide professional association for those involved in public administration.

Speaking of my work, Jo Rose, Director Digital at IPAA NSW Division, said: “Guy has a unique ability to comprehend and represent complex issues in a simple and accessible manner. He was a pleasure to deal with through all stages of production of our video. I highly recommend using his services.”

New NUW video scribe animation with sound and animation FX

Following on from the first video scribe animation two years ago, I recently created a new video scribe animation for the National Union of Workers (NUW). The video scribe animation continued the NUW “Jobs You Can Count On” campaign and storyline on a topical issue in Australia: job security and the casualisation of the workforce. However, the new video scribe animation was created with several new dynamics. Firstly, the animation was developed as one whole story made up of three key sections, which could be edited in post production so each section could also be a ‘stand alone’ video scribe animation. Using a sketch book style approach with ‘page turns’ helped achieve this. Plus, this latest video scribe animation included props, sound tracks, sound effects and animation effects. The audio features the voice overs of Tim Kennedy, Victorian Branch Secretary, NUW and an NUW employee. If you watch it, make sure you watch it on full screen and turn your device volume up for full effect.

Here is one of the video scribe animation sections edited as a stand alone and individual story:

Painting a story for Calrossy Pre-school

Stories come in all shapes and sizes. I recently painted a large-scale educational mural for Calrossy Pre-school in Tamworth, NSW, which is one feature in a fantastic new ‘discovery’ garden where the children can explore, play and interact with and learn about nature. With the story of a sailing boat race in Sydney Harbour as the core thread through the middle of the painting, the bright and eye-catching mural plays out stories below and above the surface of the ocean. The level of detail was intentional to draw the viewer’s eye into the many underlying messages and ‘stories within the story’ to help spark interest, learning, imagination and, above all, little moments of joy.

Making wine simple

Holding the highest wine qualification, John Downes is one of only 300 Masters of Wine in the world. With 20 years experience as a wine entertainer, broadcaster and journalist, this short video scribe animation I created tells you more about his mission to make wine simple and easy to enjoy. Yes, if you haven’t guessed it or made the connection yet, this was a Father & Son video scribing production! Lots of fun to create.