Innovative animation fronts HeadSmart brain tumour campaign

Leatherhead-based design studio creates the Headsmart campaign’s animated icon, nicknamed Sam.
Each of the 10 childhood brain tumour symptoms is represented by Sam in a different, easily-recognisable form. Sam and the symptoms have been made into an innovative and engaging animation designed to appeal to families and healthcare professionals alike, outlining each of the ten symptoms. The animation and new branding was created in conjunction with Content Creatures, a Leatherhead digital animation and design studio.

Brett Davey, Creative Director at Content Creatures says: “As this was the first project Content Creatures had worked on with The Brain Tumour Charity, we weren’t sure how far we could push the creative. The brief was clear, appeal to young people and teenagers; the challenge was that they can be a cynical bunch.”

Brett’s team decied early on that a degree of shock-humour would resonate more sincerely with the target audience and make for a campaign and animation with a greater impact

“We didn’t want to go wild and thought that if we bookended the animation with the vomiting and puberty symptoms, there was a better chance the video would get shared! Because of the age of the audience and the amount of video they consume every day, we were concerned this could end up as disposable web content; watched once and immediately forgotten, That’s when we realised we needed to create an earworm; an ever-so-slightly annoying, but catchy song that keeps playing inside the listener’s head.We wrote the song on the Friday and when came back in on Monday, everybody was still humming it – so we knew it was sticky.”

Key to the animations’ success and impact was Sam’s design simplicity

Brett continues: “Sam is a simple stick figure; on the one hand it kept the animation simple, but on the other it meant we had to think hard about how to convey certain symptoms, particularly those that concerned double vision and abnormal eye movement. In many ways, this helped us to open up Sam’s world to become more abstract and visually interesting.”

Targeting and owning the social media space was also paramount to Content Creatures’ approach:

“The film had to work for the main HeadSmart site, but also reach teenagers in the social media spaces they inhabit. From a technical perspective, it was tricky laying out scenes that could work just as well in an ultra-widescreen format for the website and square format for Instagram. The animators did a great job to make that work. The whole team at Content Creatures really enjoyed working on the animation and song. As writers, animators, singers and musicians, it’s incredibly rewarding to work on a project that is both creatively strong and, more importantly, can raise early awareness of the symptoms of brain tumours. Without doubt, the best moment of the project was when we first presented the boards to the marketing team. We were quite nervous about how some scenes would be received, and to make matters worse we were presenting remotely and the video conferencing wasn’t working so we couldn’t see the clients’ faces. There were quiet murmurs on the other end of the phone as we went through the frames, until we got to the ‘Arrested Puberty’ scene and everything went quiet. We explained the action in scene and were met by a roar of laughter. We knew then that we weren’t being weird creatives, but had come up with an idea that would resonate; if people laugh at a video, they share it. That’s how social media works these days.”

The symptom interval (length of time between symptom onset and diagnosis) was 9.1 weeks at the time of the campaign’s launch in June 2011. By June 2012 the symptom interval had reduced to 7.5 weeks and it’s since been reduced to 6.5 weeks.Newly-added symptoms, after a review of all the evidence showing the most common signs of childhood brain tumours, include increasing head circumference in under-fives and loss of vision across all age groups.

The HeadSmart campaign, lists the warning signs of a brain tumour in babies, children and teenagers. These include vomiting, balance problems and unusual eye movements.

Hayley Epps, campaign manager for The Brain Tumour Charity, said: “Brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of children in the UK. HeadSmart has two aims: to save lives and reduce long-term disability by bringing down childhood brain tumour diagnosis times. Relaunching the campaign, and with the help of Sam and the symptoms animation that Content Creatures developed, will help us to achieve that goal by alerting more healthcare professionals, parents and young people to the signs and symptoms of the disease.”

Spot the symptoms
– Persistent/recurrent headache
– Persistent/recurrent vomiting
– Balance/co-ordination/walking problems
– Abnormal eye movements
– Blurred or double vision
– Behaviour change
– Fits or seizures
– Abnormal head position such as wry neck, head tilt or stiff neck
– Increasing head circumference (crossing centiles)
– Delayed or arrested puberty
– Symptoms vary across age groups. For more information, visit headsmart.org.uk/