NYU Bernstein Institute Partner Stories
The Task: Tell the story of two incredible organizations in a 2 to 3 minute animated piece with an approachable, human feel
My Process: Brainstorming, storyboarding, illustration, animation and video production
Stakeholders: NYU Bernstein Institute team, JLI founder Jhody Polk, the Barefoot Law team
Methods + Tools: Procreate, Photoshop, After Effects
Results: Two video pieces that were shared with NYU Bernstein Instituteās mailing lists and used by the organizations represented to share their mission and story with a wide audience
Barefoot Law
Barefoot Law is a a nonprofit organization based in Uganda which empowers people with free legal information so that they can use it to develop legal solutions for their justice needs.
Based on the brief from NYU, I envisioned an illustration style that clearly showed the artistās hand and involved a human touch. After a few rounds of storyboarding, the sketches were digitized but only cleaned up to a certain extent, with digitally painted color that clearly shows brushstrokes. These were later animated to be painted in to further emphasize materials, texture, and humanity.
JLI
The Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative (JLI) was founded by Jhody Polk, a formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyer from Florida and 2018 Soros Justice fellow. The JLI invests in jailhouse lawyers - incarcerated justice advocates - as a core strategy in ending the cycle of incarceration and is housed at NYU School of Law's Bernstein Institute for Human Rights.
JLI has a similar ethos to Barefoot Law, so the Bernstein Institute team agreed to develop this piece using the same visual style, but the storyboarding process ended up being much more involved. JLIās work is heavily based on Participatory Action Research, which involves researchers and participants working together to understand a problematic situation and change it for the better. Explaining this necessary concept made the script more abstract, presenting an interesting challenge in terms of representing it visually. You can see several iterations of the storyboards below.
