How Can We Help Tom? is a series of short animated videos created for Dr. Anna Lembke's pain management curriculum for undergraduate medical students. Our creative assignment was to revamp Dr. Lembke's lecture series using a memorable recurring character and style — but we only had one week.
In response we created "Tom Vignetti," who is a crash-dummy-style character that constantly gets addicted and treated for addiction. But the deadline constraint led to a new direction for the team's design choices which produced a novel set of animations in a very short amount of time. The final videos run as photo-romans by way of MS Paint, where we went for an intentionally lo-fi pastiche style in the artistic direction, even at times placing the illustrations directly on photographs.
Illustrations from the videos.
In the story, we follow Tom as he gets addicted to alcohol to cope with the stress of medical school, gets treated, turns to cigarettes at AA meetings, gets treated, gets addicted to opioids following back surgery, gets treated, and so on.
Work-in-progress: the initial sketch of Tom as a retired pilot and script revisions in process.
Dr Lembke's initial attempt at introducing a recurring character into her lectures (left) and our project completed in a week (right).
Stills used for the shorts are from Breaking Bad and The Royal Tenenbaums.
