Locomotion’s online safety adventure

Working in association with Straker Films, Locomotion has recently completed work on a short animated educational film. Commissioned by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) centre – the UK’s national centre for protecting children – the film is central to CEOP’s response to European Safer Internet Day on 9th February, and lies at the heart of a group of initiatives being launched by the organisation, targeted at children as young as five.

The 8 minute animation introduces Lee and Kim, a brother and sister navigating the online world with the help of their trusted superhero friend SID! With his super powers, SID shows them how to keep themselves safe while having fun online. Based around 4 simple tips for children to remember and a song, the cartoon aims to teach children how to protect themselves and others around them. As well as addressing grooming, the animation also focuses on digital citizenship highlighting the importance of treating each other well and behaving responsibly not only in the playground, but also online. This resource is being delivered to school children across the UK and we’re hoping kids around the world will get the opportunity to enjoy it too.

Locomotion’s brilliant animator, Petria Whelan, designed and created the characters and backgrounds in Flash. With the soundtrack pre-recorded, we were tasked with bringing the voices to life with Manga style animation, which was developed to achieve a more international finish. Particular attention was given to the predatory adult to ensure that he was portrayed as an ordinary rather than villainous character. Like the adult user who pretends to be a child in his online profile, the adult has been drawn to look like a child in the online world but gradually his scale and movement reveal him to be an adult as the sense of danger increases. Fortunately the children have SID to save the day!

Locomotion are very proud to be involved in such an important campaign and hope that our animation will help educate children about online safety.

Watch Lee and Kim’s Adventure now!

Read more on the BBC News site.

Safer Internet Day. 9th February 2010

Safer Internet Day is organised by Insafe every year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.

In 2009 Safer Internet Day was celebrated through 500 events in 50 countries all over the world. This year Locomotion are very proud to be involved after being commissioned to create a short animated film aimed at publicising safer internet use to children, incorporating the key topic for 2010 “Think B4 U Post”.

For more information on how we made the film, check out our news page or click here to view it now.