SMART-226 - Space Apps Challenge

SMART-226| The Art of It All

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.

The importance of portraying “A Quarentene History”

Summary

Our project is to produce a short film, an animation, illustrating the feelings shared by many who are isolated and the changes that happened. This solution is important because according to numerous studies, millennials and gen Z suffer more with mental illnesses than the previous generations. Illnesses such as anxiety tend to be aggravated due to loneliness and constant pandemic news. An unhealthy population is unable to produce to its full capacity. We hope our action can have an impact on helping people get healthier and happier by shining a light on the mental health matter.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We decided to use visual arts because it is a universal language that will make the message more accessible

How We Developed This Project

Everyone in the team wanted a more creative approach. We all appreciate the arts and thought our final product would be accessible to many people which is one of our main goals. We decided to choose the mental health topic because our generation (we are all gen Z) struggles a lot with them, some of our members personally struggle with it. Due to social distancing, some of these issues become even more sensitive, so we decided to portrait it. We used NASA data especially for pictures to compose our scenes. We used Google Drive, PowerPoint, Toon Boom, Harmony and ShotCut, besides Meet, WhatsApp and Discord for communication. We struggled a lot with the animation part, none of us knew a thing about it. Besides, we had a bit of trouble putting the script together. The achievements were mainly learning how to use new tools, such as the animation one, and also working from a distance.