Mass hysteria is a social phenomenon that is known to occur in communities affected by famine, poverty, or other stressful situations. It is the collective transmission of fears and beliefs caused by rumours spread throughout a population.

Chances are, you've experienced modern mass hysteria to some degree. Whether you were directly affected or watched it through a screen, the effects of sharing false media are vast and inescapable. The end of the world in 2012? Clowns walking the streets in 2016? Even something like the Tide pod challenge. These are all examples of small pockets of misinformation spreading like wild fire through the internet and causing panic around the world. This project aims to bring awareness to the way that modern technologies like social media can enable us to spread new kinds of mass hysteria. It's a satirical look on the subject, and a prompt for viewers not to take everything they see online so seriously.

I chose to alter a strong blackletter font for the first half of my title card as it link the project back to my initial interest in the Salem Witch Trials, then fades out into a bold sans serif to show the more modern view on it. I decided to go with a rounded sans serif  rather than a sharp one as a lot of my other type has been hand drawn, and the round edges maintain a consistency in style. Both have been either re-drawn by hand or added to with drawn elements for their animation. 

For this project, there were a range of briefs we could choose to respond to and I decided to go with Lost. My initial idea was to do something centered around the Salem Witch Trials focusing on the lost lives and lost sanity of the people of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, when the longest and most prolific case of mass hysteria in American history took place. However, this focus quickly shifted to general mass hysteria as a broader subject, and then to the way mass hysteria affects us in a modern setting. This project is less about something that had once been lost, but more about an ongoing loss that is happening and will continue to happen for as long as we share stories to one another. 

All of the works have been hand animated in Photoshop using frame animation. I found kinetic typography, despite the fact that it's moving, to be quite static and lackluster for the content I was wanting to portray. Animating in this style allowed me to give the work a much more hand-made feeling and I was able to produce a constant and charming visual aesthetic that I could control precisely. The idea for the final video is that as the information snowballs, the animation would become more chaotic over time to match the chaos of hysteria being spread.

I used a website called Calligraphr.com to create my own simple font based off of my own handwriting, which I've used for the font in my text message sequences. This meant I could use a font instead of writing each word by hand without losing the rough/sketchy aesthetic I had been working with for the video. 

However, when making this font I rushed and ended up misusing the guidelines,  creating capital letters that are larger and sit lower than my lowercase letters. I decided to go ahead and use this version of the font in my prototype videos, although it looks very messy and childish and I would definitely change this for the final video.