Introducing the RSA Student Design awards

The RSA Student Design Awards is an annual competition for higher education students which is run by the RSA (Royal society of Arts). The briefs are focused on real life problems and students are challenged to design ways to tackle these problems. This is their website:
http://sda.thersa.org/en/

I am really excited about this competition, it seems like a great opportunity to do something meaningful that could reach a lot of people.  
This year, the "moving picture" brief is about creating an animation to accompany one of two audio files. I chose the file called "live with less", which is an excerpt from a speech by Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology at the London school of economics. You can fin it here:

http://sda.thersa.org/en/challenge/rsa-student-design-awards-2016/phase/rsa-student-design-awards-2016/track/moving-pictures-en-1

My friend Ra'ees approached me very early on in the process and asked if I wanted to work with him on this project and since we'd worked well together before and were allowed to work in small groups for this project too, I was happy to accept.  

We threw a lot of ideas at each other, some of them good some of the terrible and started making little tests to see where those ideas could take us. It has been interesting to share ideas like that and having to be confident enough to share ideas, reject other ideas and accept ideas being rejected. I am glad that Ra'ees and I don't need to be polite with each other. I know that if I have a terrible idea, he will let me know and the project won't suffer. 
We also developed our own way of working together which consists of giving each other clear tasks and deadlines and talking a lot (I know it seems obvious but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated) and what we have called "wordbubbles".

We basically divided the text into three phases, giving it a three-act structure then wrote down key words and tried to find images for these words. Our main character is an anthropomorphic turtle and our main setting is a big city made of rubbish. The turtle, as well as background characters will be animated in 2D using either CelAction or Harlequin Toonz (probably CelAction as we are less familiar with Toonz) and the background will be built and photographed. The city is made out of cardboard, used tin cans and coffee cups. We are still testing and thinking about ways to paint it.

Early tests:

What we have now:

We also finished the first draft of our storyboard and character design for which we got feedback from our tutor on Thursday. This week will be dedicated to responding to the feedback and making an animatic.