American Red Cross: Extreme Heat Hero PSA
Extreme heat can be deadly. American Red Cross reminds people the solutions. In this animated public service announcement the existing branding and characters are extended to show scenes continuously weaving through neighborhoods and emphasizes community connection. Symbols are used to clearly show what is good or bad in various situations in the same style and language that is uniform through the American Red Cross new branding and phone application.
Group Creative Director - Aerien Mull
Associate Creative Director - Blake Hicks
Art Director - Emily Spitler
Junior Digital Art Director - Haze Nguyen
Desginer - Katya Shakhova
Writer - Alyssa Grubstein
Styleboard & Story Development
Style Frames
Story Development
I pitched storyboards to clear up ideas for how the hero psa should best portray the message from the client. Collaborating with designers as well as Alyssa our copywriter we developed the idea of “check on your neighbor” and “hand in hand” until we formed the final storyline. The important highlights from the client was the need to rely and look out for those in your community. In the end, despite the animation challenge, we decided the importance of having full characters shown and merged it with the other two concepts. Teh expression of the character and showcase of diversity makes it more inviting to viewers.
Story pitch 1: Continuous scroll through neighborhood that would highlight different parts of the community and different sections of peoples lives, showcasing how they interacted in subtle passing ways without honing in on character expression
Story pitch 2: Isolated vignettes that focus on icons, buttons and objects. They would interact and “pass” the movement onwards to the next scene, but remain simple and centered. This would easily display right and wrong actions, work easily for efficient animation and aligns with design language used throughout the existing app.