Award-winning animation recognition for Bearded Fellows at the MPA Awards 2024

As an animation studio, receiving award-winning animation recognition is a fantastic way to celebrate your client’s project wins.

This year, Bearded Fellows was awarded a highly commended award for best animation at the MPA Inspiration Awards. 

The awards run by the Manchester Publicity Association are a beacon for the creative and digital sector in the Greater Manchester area. 

Last night, Bearded Fellows were in attendance with the Manchester creative sector to recognise the amazing talent across Manchester at the 12th MPA Inspiration Awards.

The Bearded Fellows Team were honoured to be recognised against strong competition from TWBA/MCR with their Crafting a Piece of ‘Coaster History campaign.

Matthew Stanners, Managing Director and Florin Mocanu, Art Director,
Bearded Fellows 

What does it take to create an award-winning animation?

Our highly commended animation  was created for our client, the British Red Cross . We created the animation created as part of a series on mental health in the workplace. This piece focused on powerful emotions. 

Here are three tips you need to create an award-winning animation.

Build confidence with the client before you introduce bold campaign ideas.

After a successful video and animation campaign the previous year, the team at British Red Cross was receptive to using animation on this project.

This allowed us to start guiding the team to diversify the richness of the video content within their training programs, with our ambition being to raise the brand visually through motion after our previous success with the first aid project.

 You can read a case study on the success of this campaign by clicking the link below.

 The British Red Cross first aid case study  

Gather insights into the intended audience. Make assumptions based on those insights to lead your campaign. 

The subject matter for the animation was powerful emotions. Focusing on how childhood trauma can be passed on and how to break the cycle;

Insights help to shape campaigns, so we researched trauma and responses to it in a visual landscape and found that   trauma-informed care shows that abstraction helps create emotional distance, making people feel safer when addressing sensitive issues. offering flexibility and allowing the viewer to connect with the content on their own terms without feeling overwhelmed.

 van der Kolk, B. A. (2014), The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

This helped to shape the art direction; removing people or places from the scenarios allows viewers to project their own emotional experiences without being led by specific race culture or gender.

Make your artwork and animation stand out in a sea of sameness.

The decision to remove people from the idea of powerful emotions, choosing instead to use shapes and icons to represent feelings, allowed us to highlight the diversity of different emotions and experiences of mental health without masking the severity of the subject matter or allowing prejudice and individual experience to get in the way of learning.

The geometric shape empowered us to represent the absorbing of emotions and showcase people as a feeling or emotions themselves without the viewer having to empathise with a singular person's story. They can centre the narrative within themselves and engage with the learning on a personal level. 

This approach allowed people of all ages and backgrounds to engage and learn from the subject matter, alleviating any negative connotations towards a person or place. 

This animation is a powerful mix of idea and execution. It takes a strong subject matter, respects the audience, and creates a piece that raises the iconic brand visually, engaging a once apprehensive marketing team to celebrate and make more animation for the British Red Cross brand.

They are now able to Stand out from the crowd in their sector and when they next commission video or animation for their platform or marketing communications, they have a better foundation to explore and also the confidence as a marketing team to want to explore animation more.

Want to learn more about animation at Bearded Fellows? Take look at our dedicated page to animation. Animation page