Final Storyboard Proposal

After a long and thorough editing process, I have come up for with a final story board for the Ad/Pop-up corona virus PSA. To re-iterate, the goal of this pop-up is to encourage children from ages 4-6 to follow the corona virus precaution protocol in a kid-friendly way. A combination of research and advise from my professor led me to the following conclusion:

• The cartoon has to be funny
• It has to be from the child’s perspective
• It has to have an iterative component
• It can not scare the child
• And its messages should be translatable through images only

So, how did I accomplish these goals. Well… lets take it one goal at a time. The first was for the cartoon to be funny and a young kids sense of humor is hard to cater too, but I decided that the best way was to turn the scary viruses into funny critters. Although the bacteria do not seem to play much of a role on the story board, that is because they can not move. Below is a sample of the close up bacteria misbehaving and will eventually be destroyed by the child in the pop-up animation. They will make little noises that symbolize them thriving outside, but dying when the water hits them. This will make the viruses not seem scary, but more like a game where all you have to get rid of them.

Now for the child’s perspective was a simple solution, the kid just had to be the main part of the simulation, with the viruses being the main supporting character. In addition, the child was made to be non-gender specific so they could apply to children of all genders and could relate and the family was made to be bi-racial so hopefully most races would feel represented as well.

The interactive component was also hard to illustrate using a story board, but is pretty simple where the child will simply press in order to do an action such as move on to the next screen, wash their hands, take shoes off.

Not scaring the child was probably the hardest part because to put it simply, I do not remember what scared me as a four year old. The only fearful dream I remember was being kidnapped by a duck cartoon in Target and being kept from my parents. I figures the concepts of deadly virus was not super comprehensible for them, but some nasty little creatures can be. In order to prevent this I chose to show two main things. First of all, I wanted to make sure that the creatures were not shown to be harming the child at any point, just simply sitting on the skin. I don’t think anyone, even a 4-6 year old would want green blobs on their body, so they should be compelling enough. Second of all, I wanted to make sure that the green blobs were always smiling. Yes, maybe that will send the slightly wrong message because the corona virus certifiably isn’t a pleasant visitor, no one wants happy green blobs on them either. In addition, when doing research on how to convince a child to do something, one obvious strategy was repetition, so ideally if the child saw the pop-up several times and the viruses are in most scenes, it should convince the child to follow the protocol.

Finally, a big edit I made was taking out the speaking component to the animation. It was decided that the words would probably be to complicated for the child to understand at such a young age. An option was to add audio, but then there would be no guarantee that the device would have sound, so it would just look too complicated. Speaking of sound, a good idea for the audio to keep a playful tone would be to have some funny cartoon music in the background. The link below is a sample of some cutesy music that would go well with the animation.

Now finally, here are the scenes for the animation. Each scene reflects about 5 seconds and has the animation instructions below.

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McInt, Leath, director. Cute Background Music. Cute Background Music, Youtube, 10 Sept. 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SjTHcaqlL8.

“Animated Bacteria Clipart Gif.” Clipart.Email, http://www.clipart.email/clipart/animated-bacteria-clipart-gif-66334.html.