One Step Forward

Hampshire College Senior Thesis

May 2016-April 2017​

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One Step Forward is a community-based animation project that depicts a character undergoing a depression like experience, who then takes a brave and significant step towards recovery.  I engaged 268 participants, each of whom have suffered from mental illness, to take the animation to a deeper dimension.

 

I began this project by creating a conceptual 3D computer animation that would communicate the narrative, yet was simple enough in form to be customized.  I then printed each of the 540 frames that make up the 45-second short. (Each frame was a silhouette of the girl as she moves through the animation).

           

I traveled around the country visiting 15 psychiatric hospitals, support groups, and jails to explain the project and enlist participants to draw on the frames. I asked each person to personalize their frame based on how they were feeling and/or their overall experience living with mental illness.  I then gathered each individually drawn picture and strung them together to make a final, collaborative animation. 

           

Through this project, I hope to inspire people with mental illness to take a step towards recovery by reaching out to a community for help, be it a parent, therapist, support group, or hospital.  I want to illustrate how taking a simple step, like drawing a single picture, can develop into something beautiful and dynamic.  Taking a step can be extremely scary and difficult, but I hope to communicate the power of taking one step forward.  

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One Step Forward was funded by a grant from Hampshire College's Ethics and Common Good Project.

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Hampshire College wrote a profile about the project.