5 ways to improve your wellbeing

Wellbeing is incredibly important – not only in this industry but in life in general! As designers and developers, you can often find yourself cooped up inside, staring at a screen for hours and forgetting to call your friends back.

There are habits you can put in place to help improve your mental and physical wellbeing; desk exercises for example, could help to keep those creative juices flowing. If you're looking for some more wellbeing tips, this animation from design studio Kilogramme could just do the trick.

Rochdale Borough commissioned the team to create the animation, asking them to meet with local teens about what 'wellbeing' means to them. "The Five Ways to Wellbeing is an existing initiative which helps people improve their mental and physical health by making small changes to their everyday lives," explains producer Jon Turner.

"After meeting with the group we built a film around their interests and environmentt; the main aim is to help promote how the five ways can easily be used in everyday life."

Director Emma Reynolds embarked on the project by trying out a new technique. Working with a team to create a 2D and 3D mix, the characters and backgrounds seamlessly blend together, proving the two aspects can indeed, work well together.

"The young adults in the film are all 3D models, but they are rendered in 2D flat colours," she explains. "The benefit of this is being able to pose them in dynamic action poses, with the ability to view them from all angles; Joe Ackerley and Jon Salter handled the 3D modelling and animation."

The other characters, such as the squirrel, granny and the dog, were designed by Emma Reynolds as 2D characters and beautifully animated by senior animator Sam Jones in Flash.

"Kristian Duffy created the stunning painted backgrounds for us, with each plane carefully split up into layers. Using these we could create a strong parallax effect as the shot panned, and a sense of depth and distance as she walked through the film," continues Reynolds. See more of Kilogramme's impressive work over on their website.