Ahead of World Cancer Day on 4th February 2018, ethical creative agency Nice and Serious launches ‘Touch Yourself’, an animation and microsite, which takes a novel approach, using playfulness to illustrate how people should check for signs of breast cancer.
The motivation behind ‘Touch Yourself’ came from Motion Designers Jade Evans, Giulia Bavagnoli, Guillaume Le Roux, Film Editor Serafima Serafimova and Web Developer Marcel Legane, who felt that there was a need for a clear and positive way to tackle breast cancer detection.
As Jade Evans explains “the resources we found online were quite clinical, so we wanted to create a short animation, that was helpful and fun, but we didn’t want to just stop there. Alongside this, we developed a microsite, which provides straightforward advice and useful links about where and how to check for signs of breast cancer.”
Playing on the ambiguity of the words ‘touch yourself’, the team chose to reveal the serious subject matter only at the very end of the animation, challenging preconceptions of how people view cancer and self-examination as something clinical and frightening. Creating a provocative and playful animation about breast cancer may be somewhat unconventional, but it is also what makes it so sharable. The music track, composed by web developer Marcel, was inspired by 80’s music to add to the sexy vibe they were going for.
At Nice and Serious, the team are encouraged to take on passion projects around any social issue they care about, called ‘Nice Works’. These projects allow any member of staff to take a creative lead role, collaborate with others and explore new techniques. ‘Touch Yourself’ is the latest of these projects.
