The project
For this awareness film for Médecins du Monde, I developed a visual world focused on access to healthcare and social rights for people living in precarious circumstances and foreign nationals in France.
The film brings together several interconnected realities. The complexity of administrative procedures, unsafe living conditions, illnesses linked to poverty, delays in medical care, and the need for genuinely universal health coverage.
My role covered art direction, storyboarding, illustration and character design.
A graphic and direct visual language
The subject called for a visual language that clearly communicates social, medical and statistical information.
I created a 4 colors restricted palette and a combination of bold colour blocks with geometric shapes within the composition. This visual grammar creates continuity across the different sequences,
The visual language draws on a graphic tradition reminiscent of Saul Bass. I reduced the shapes to their essentials with sharp contrasts and immediate visual impact. The compositions have an almost cut-paper quality, with particular attention paid to colour relationships, overlaps and the strength of each individual sign.
Numbers, administrative documents, medical symbols and abstract elements are integrated into the same system as the characters and environments.
Communicating through the body
Now that simple shapes form every character, I chose to keep facial features to a minimum. For this reason, the character expression comes through posture, gesture, interaction and scale.
The characters represent human situations without locking them into a single emotion. Hence, bodies become carriers of meaning so as to suggest a relationship, a difficulty, a period of waiting or a form of support.
The character design remains deliberately clear and adaptable. Consequently, characters move through different compositions while maintaining a shared visual identity.
A visual structure built around meaning
The art direction brings together human and informational elements. This is why data are part of the image’s structure and rhythm.
Typography, numbers, documents and medical symbols make abstract systems more tangible. Meanwhile, the environments connect these systems to concrete living conditions.
The visual system needed to accommodate very different levels of information: a statistic, an administrative situation, a medical condition, a group of people or a landscape. With attention to the consistency of the palette and shapes, the system enables the film to move from one information to the next without breaking its visual continuity.
This choice was made to convey a simple yet warm message, in the same vein as my illustrations for Gams Federation.
To be sure to bring clarity to the subject, I structured the information and preserved the human dimension of the situations represented.
Project information
Client: Médecins du Monde
Year: 2021
Format: Awareness film for motion design
Role: Art direction, storyboarding, illustration and character design
The figures quoted in the film reflect the data and sources available and used when it was developed, in 2021.
