Featured in NOAA's Ocean Today Video Gallery 

Take Ten! is a short animation I did as a part of NOAA's Ocean Today: Full Moon Wave Safe Series. The video is narrated by Bruckner Chase, with sound design by Kurt Mann. Ocean Today has some award winning videos, so check them out if you have chance.

Take Ten! Is an awareness video highlighting the importance of not jumping right into the current when someone is trouble. It instead focuses on keeping cool, calling for additional help, and finding a safe way to continue with the rescue. Although it sounds pretty straight forward, safety communities were noticing a pattern of deaths in which the second person, trying to rescue the person in danger, had a higher risk of drowning. Usually fighting undertow or strong cross currents, the second person trying not to give up succumbs to exhaustion; while the initial victim already further out is released from the cross current and is able to swim back or is rescued.

I started by creating a storyboard based on the OT team's script. The above gif shows the storyboards as an animatic I pitched to the producer. After the pitch was approved I started designing characters. One requirement was that we'd have two versions of the video. One for the mainland U.S. release, and one for the Pacific Region; especially in American Samoa where second drownings had seen a sharp increase.

I designed the characters in Illustrator because I wanted the vectors stretch cleanly after rigging in AE with DUIK plugin from Rainbox. The heads needed to be able to shapes(vector) for the tweens to work correctly. Here's an early 2.5D test of the rigs in AE. The lifeguard running-in clip ended up being cut from the scene because the first guy still had find and throw in something buoyant as part of the steps in Take 10!, and I didn't want anyone questioning why he still reacted when the lifeguard was on her way.

Here are some backgrounds that I created in Illustrator to match the style of the characters.

Here is the Pacific Region version that I re-created with characters that are more representative of the Islands. Note that this version doesn't have lifeguards because most of the native beaches on American Samoa are made up of communities and families.

Hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look as much as I did working on it! Feel free to leave comments and thanks for viewing!