Nudge

My project seeks to provide a simple, humorous and creative way of transforming persistent issues in our community, based on government data about health and social issues.

Project Repository:

Storyboarding:

• I thought about the issues that concern me. The key ones that came to mind are: health and body image for young people, bullying, and being overweight and unhealthy.

• I then looked at the ACT Government data sets. The data confirmed that these are major issues in our community.

• I then looked at websites like Kids Helpline and I again found a lot of discussion about the same set of issues. Even in my own school people talk about experiencing these same issues.

• I was interested by the fact that we know what the issues are, but we don’t know how to solve them.

• I find this a very engaging problem - that the issues have become ‘accepted’ because we don’t know how to solve them. 

• I currently have limited coding skills although I want to develop them.

• I have, however, played around with several different animation packages in the past.

• Given the GovHack timeframe, I thought I would develop my GovHack project as an animation.

• In terms of trying to help ‘solve’ a problem, I thought that it might be helpful to think about media options from the perspective of a young person.

• I therefore decided to:

  • link body image with the Snow White theme of ‘Mirror, Mirror’,

  • use the central theme from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to promote healthy portions,

  • demonstrate acceptance by using different breeds of dogs, and

  • use the popular ‘What am I?’ slogan to promote exercise.

• I also have ideas for adverts for issues related to the use of public transport and encouraging people to walk over that magic limit of 1km (as discussed with officials from the ACT Government), but I didn’t have time to produce a demo of these ideas in the timeframe.

• Using the themes discussed earlier I created simple adverts in Crazy-Talk Animator. While the advertisement videos are fairly basic, they will hopefully demonstrate the messages I am trying to promote.

• Noting how difficult it is to change the behaviours of people, I knew that the best I could do would be to prompt or ‘nudge’ a change in people - this is why I titled my project ‘Nudge’.

• I planned my video (each of my scenes) using pen and paper, which was the quickest method to use in the timeframe (and given the clear concept). 

• I thought my animated videos needed some background music.

• I therefore went through various music labels trying to identify a melody that suited the sort of animated video I wanted to create. The best site I found in the timeframe for reviewing music that has been released under Creative Commons is: http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos.

• I decided to use the following piece of music: https://archive.org/details/badpanda074. I acknowledge and thank Ben Mason for making this tune available.

• A key limitation of Crazy-Talk Animator is that the graphics and suite of movements is reasonably limited. I therefore needed to source images from the internet which took up a fair amount of time, and meant that the movement is static.