Age Cymru: an animated film for a new dementia advocacy service, in English and Welsh

Age Cymru needed to explain a new dementia advocacy service, to people newly diagnosed and the families around them, at a time when the pandemic had shut down the face-to-face contact the charity usually relied on. We made the film in English and Welsh.

The outcome

A two-and-a-half-minute animated film following one man's journey through a dementia diagnosis, from the disorientation of losing his bearings to finding his voice again through Age Cymru's advocacy service. Delivered as a complete bilingual production, not an English original with subtitles bolted on afterwards: separate scripts, separate voiceover recordings, separate final renders and separate subtitled cuts in English and Welsh.

The challenge

Age Cymru's Dementia Advocacy Project is funded by Welsh Government to help people with dementia keep a say in their own lives: to be heard, to have their wishes considered, to keep their rights. The service existed. Not enough people knew it did.

The charity had run into three problems at once.

A pandemic had shut the usual door. Face-to-face advocacy work had been disrupted by Covid, so awareness now had to travel through screens instead of conversations.

The subject resists sentimentality. Get it wrong and a dementia film either frightens people off or talks down to them. Age Cymru's own brand principles rule out both: no us-and-them framing, no pity, nothing but honesty and dignity.

Every asset had to exist twice. Video, social content and a leaflet, all required in English and Welsh from the outset, which meant a Wales-based studio who could deliver both properly, not translate one into the other after the fact.

It could happen to any of us, and with over 42,000 people under 65 with a diagnosis, you never know when it might be you or someone you love.

Our approach

We followed one man through the moment dementia actually changes something: not a diagnosis on a page, but the day he loses his bearings on a street he has walked for years.

Every scene was boarded and shot-listed before a single frame was animated: a rough pass first, to lock the story and the timing, then colour once it held together.

A story, not a service list. The film opens on a warm, ordinary life, a mantelpiece of family photos, decades passing in a few seconds, before it shows what dementia actually disrupts: his sense of place, his independence, his confidence.

Colour as the emotional instrument. The street he gets lost on desaturates and speeds up around him. Colour and calm return in stages as Age Cymru's advocacy service reconnects him: a digital scrapbook of memories built with his family, a phone call to the service, a bus ride home with his confidence back.

A voice that refuses pity. ‘A dementia diagnosis shouldn't mean losing your independence. Or your voice.’ The line the whole film is built to earn.

A complete bilingual production. Full scripts, professional voiceover sessions and finished renders in English and Welsh, plus subtitled cuts of both for social.

What it does for Age Cymru

The film gives Age Cymru a way to explain the Dementia Advocacy service without anyone having to sit through a leaflet: what it is for, who it is for, and how to reach it, in under three minutes, in whichever language the viewer needs. It is part of a longer relationship: Age Cymru has come back to us for more than one animation.

Credits

• Client: Age Cymru
• Studio: Alchemy
• Languages: English and Welsh, full separate productions