Growing Hope is a nonprofit organization based in Ypsilanti, Michigan that aims to strengthen and support the local food system throughout the community and beyond.
October 2020 - December 2020
After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Miro, Zoom
Animator, Video Editor
Sharon Lin, Chayla Gould, Zoi Crampton
The Growing Hope Urban Farm is an open community space where people may learn about and grow their own fresh food. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, their farm tours had to be adjusted to an online format or be accessible from a socially distanced manner.
In order to provide safe, socially distanced tours, our team proposed a video that would introduce the space to audiences in an appealing but virtual manner.
Our team of three worked on this project fully remotely. Conversations primarily took place over Zoom or text, and the initial stages of planning and storyboarding were done over Miro.
As this was an outreach project for an art class on the topic of Social Spaces, my teammates Chayla and Zoi illustrated the different sections of the farm while adhering to Growing Hope’s brand and color palette. After they finished hand-drawing the illustrations, I separated them into layers in Photoshop and added animation and movement to them in After Effects.
If accompanied by audio narration, videos are inherently inaccessible to low-hearing audiences. As such, I added closed captions to the video to aid low-hearing and ESL audiences.
Because our team members were unable to travel to the farm to see the space, we had to rely solely on client communication in order to understand what we were designing for. Fortunately, our client kindly sent us drone images of the farm in order to give us a better understanding of its look and layout, which aided Chayla and Zoi in their illustrative process.
The pandemic has inexplicably changed how users interact with social and physical spaces. As designers and artists, it’s important to come up with alternative and creative solutions for users to continue to interact with these spaces from home. While I had never considered myself passionate about video-making before, this project taught me how videos can provide a new avenue of accessibility for users who are unable to physically experience a space. In the future, I want to try experimenting more with videos and motion design, and more thoroughly integrate them into my style and workflow.