Latimer / Brent Council / NHS: We Care (2012)

RUNNING TIME: 5mins 19secs

An animated film, part of a pack given to young people who have just entered the foster care system

This is an animation about foster caring that I made in conjunction with Latimer Creative Media and a group of young people in the care system in Brent.

Over a series of workshops with the young people, themes and characters were invented and the concept of the animation was born. Alongside these activities, we recorded a number of interviews with the young people where we got them to talk about the feelings of going into care and how they cope with it all. These interviews formed the underlying structure of animation which I then went away and produced.

It was a challenge to include so many different ideas and inputs into the same film, the brief was for a comic book style with a super-hero, that had to mention health and education, but be fun and also include these rather honest documentary style voices overs. The solution was to have our protagonist in a new foster home feeling somewhat trepidatious and for him to find this comic book which would show him lots of different scenarios where all the questions he was worried about would be answered. So that by the time he returned from his journey he was confident and happy to face the challenges ahead.

The resulting film is part of a pack given to young people who have just entered the care system, so that on the first night in a new home, they can watch the animation with their new carer, have something fun to talk about and have some of their fears allayed.