Trauma and the Brain is nominated for a Royal Television Society Scotland Award 2016 for Animation and VFX.

NHS Lanarkshire’s Ending Violence and Abuse Services wanted a film to explain to professionals the impact that trauma can have on the brain and how it affects memory. We made them an animation and wanted to share a few reasons why animation works for sensitive subjects.

1.    Confidentiality – animation lets you tell true-life stories while completely concealing people’s identities.

2.    Locations and Flashbacks – when all the visuals are created for the animation, you can go anywhere in the world, anywhere in your imagination. As well as moving you through space, creative animation can move you through time, so you can tell stories that take years to play out in real life.

3.    Compression – writing an animation script allows you to boil down a story to the essential messages, and get across a lot of information or argument in a short time on screen.

4.    Shelf-life – documentary footage can sometimes look dated surprisingly quickly. Animation allows you to create something that lasts longer.

5.    Shareability – cartoons are visually attractive, quirky, unthreatening, and often funny… so more sharable online. And the more your film is shared, the more people get your message.