Mid-Ohio Food Collective – No School, No Lunch

We had worked with MOFC in the past, but were reconnected during one of our Content Adventure events. We got to talking about storytelling and one thing led to another and… Bam! We were starting a project together. MOFC hosts an annual fundraising campaign for children and families during the summer to support them with food scarcity. When school is out, it can be much harder for families to feed their children and, in turn, themselves. So for this campaign, they needed a video that not only touched the viewers, prompting them to visit the campaign’s landing page and donate. They also needed a video that accurately represented the people who would be affected by the campaign.

We sat down with their team and listened as they discussed statistics, geographics, and stories, taking notes on who this story would focus on and what their story would be. We then took those notes and developed the story and script. We then presented a storyboard and art direction. 

For art direction, we presented a few different options (seen in the video below). But ultimately, it came down to one. Inspired by the children’s book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle, this design was intended to be both accessible to children and nostalgic to the audience. And of course, using “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” in a video about food scarcity just felt like a natural path for us to follow.

With our direction set, we created the design frames. This video became less of a commercial and more of a short film very quickly. Sometimes you just have to follow the story, and we certainly did. But we also needed to stick to a specific budget. So we designed these frames to follow the plates so the food (and the lack thereof) could tell the story.

Once the design frames were finished, we began animating. Since we were working with food trays, plates, and text as opposed to characters, we needed to make those elements really pop. So animation was vital to getting the message across while keeping things entertaining and eye-catching.

We also added sound design, which we had gone back and forth about since the beginning. We knew we wanted the music to feel integrated into the video, but we weren’t sure about the voice over. Finally, we record some temporary VO and fell in love with it. So we recorded with a group of kids of varying ages and then worked with Stereo Couture to develop the beautiful final mix.