The Art of It All

What have you learned about yourself or the world as a result of living through the COVID-19 pandemic? Your challenge is to express your experience of living through this historic time through a work of art.

Panic Attacks in COVID-19 Era

Summary

Our project is concentrated in expressing the psychological effects of this quarantine in teens due to COVID-19 and the problems that they face, for instance, depression, loneliness, and boredom.Our video tells the story of a girl called Sarah, she was a social one, she feels bored and depressed because she misses her friends, she read about the virus, suddenly, she felt shortness of breath so she thought that she infected then she fainted, finally, she goes to the hospital and the doctor said that she is suffering from a panic attack.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Through our project, we discussed how social isolation, being at home, and the fright of becoming close to death. Talking about anxiety and panic attacks that can be experienced during the quarantine. We aim our animated video can describe the status of people and how it can be so difficult to be isolated from the world-leading to serious psychological problems. How frustrated and difficulties we are going through. Also relating isolation to astronauts who live outside our planet for years and their difficulties.

How We Developed This Project

During quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have to be socially isolated from our friends and relatives. After leaving our schools we have free times and we are alone, every day with the same faces and there are no activities, we can only communicate with others by using apps, or social media.

Also, every day we saw an increase in the number of positive cases, that can be one day from our families or friends, the virus is increasing rapidly, some of us suffer from panic attack due to fear from being infected. This pressure and feelings inspired us to work together to express our feelings through our project.

We have used NASA contexts in describing the isolation of astronauts and their psychological problems and how they manage them.

As our project is a descriptive animated video, we used software programs to animate our characters. Freepik is a site that has various characters which we used as our characters in the video. After choosing the characters, we put it in ADOBE illustrator where characters have been reformed respectively to the required pose for the scenes. Then the characters were placed in ADOBE after effects where the backgrounds, durations of the scenes, and external objects in the scene were put. In addition, the voice-over was replaced too by ADOBE after effects.

Our problems are our achievements too, our group decided to work on animated video, but we didn’t have any experience in writing scripts or animation programs, we have to listen to tutorials to help us, we make every second in the video step by step, some difficulties with the programs of animation (ADOBE after effects, ADOBE illustrator) and how to deal with it but after a bit of time we started to work on it.

Also, we start working on the video 3 days before the deadline, so we work under the pressure, finally, we finished our video successfully.

Project Demo

That's the link of the video demonstrating our solution.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tgULKprQqKsARRfu09J2ro0eSPjVSiMZ/view?usp=sharing

Data & Resources

1- https://www.self.com/story/shortness-of-breath-anxiety-coronavirus

In this article, it describes how the shortness of breath can be explained either as coronavirus or anxiety (panic attacks). A girl tells her story with panic attacks and how her shortness of breath was mistaken as coronavirus. And information on how to differentiate shortness of breath of being a symptom of the virus or anxiety.


2- https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/social-isolation/in-context


Through this resource from NASA, we could describe the isolation that the astronauts live in during their missions

- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/an-astronaut-s-tips-for-living-in-space-or-anywhere

Here NASA gives tips on how to manage your isolation to avoid both physical and psychological problems. We have used the self-care tip in our story due to the psychological moral it contains.

Tags
#animation #anxiety #panic_attack #social_isolation #social_distancing #covid-19
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.