Hafan Cymru: five bilingual films on healthy relationships, equality and abuse

Hafan Cymru runs the Spectrum Project, funded by Welsh Government, teaching children and young people across Wales about healthy relationships, equality and abuse. We made five animations for it, every one of them in English and Welsh, for audiences starting at three years old. The organisation has since renamed to stori, which is why the whole library got rebuilt in 2023.

The outcome

Five films, ten language masters, made between 2021 and 2022 and then re-versioned in both languages in 2023. Three teach children to recognise how they feel and who they can tell, pitched separately at Foundation Phase, Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3. A fourth trains school staff in what to do when a child discloses something. A fifth tackles peer to peer sexual harassment in secondary schools. Twenty two client masters in all.

The challenge

Three of the five films had to make the same argument to three different ages, and that is the whole problem. What you say to a child in Foundation Phase, to a nine year old in Key Stage 2 and to a thirteen year old in Key Stage 3 cannot be one film with the words swapped out. Each key stage needed its own approach: its own visual language, its own level of directness, and its own judgement about how much a child that age can be told without being frightened.

Foundation Phase had to work for children who cannot yet name a feeling, let alone explain one. Key Stage 2 had to cover recognising that something is wrong, either in yourself or in a friend. Key Stage 3 had to be straight with teenagers, who switch off the moment they are talked down to. Pitch any of the three wrong and the film either frightens a child or stops being any use to them.

All five also had to work in a classroom in either language, and end somewhere real. Every one of them finishes on a helpline a child can actually ring.

Everyone has the right to feel safe, warm and cared for.

The opening line of the Key Stage 2 film, and the sentence the whole series is built to protect.

Our approach

Draw the feelings, not the abuse. The idea that carries the youngest two films is that difficult feelings are scribbles. Worry is a purple tangle, sadness a deep blue one, fear a red one. They follow the character around, they grow on bad days until they fill the room, and, crucially, nobody else can see them. It gives a small child a way to point at something they cannot yet name, and it means the film never has to depict the thing causing the feeling. The scribbles were hand animated in TVPaint so they move like drawing rather than like graphics.

Turn down the client's mascot and offer something better. The Spectrum Project already had a mascot, and the obvious route was to build the films around it. We argued against it in the script, on the grounds that the character would leave us creatively restrained, and proposed carrying the scribble emotions across the age bands instead. That decision is why a seven year old watching the Key Stage 2 film recognises the same visual language they met at four, and it is the single biggest thing we changed about the brief.

Let the honesty grow with the age. By Key Stage 3 the visual language changes completely. The film uses shadow: a figure behind a door, an arm around a shoulder in a corridor, a plate thrown at a dinner table. Nothing violent is ever shown, only threat, and the film is careful to tell a teenager not to confront the person hurting them or their friend, but to find someone to talk to first.

Make one of them for the adults. The fourth film is not for children at all. It trains school staff on what to do in the minutes after a child tells them something, structured around receive, reassure, react and report. It is blunt about the things that go wrong: do not show shock or disbelief, and never promise to keep a secret you cannot keep. The line it offers instead is one a teacher can actually say out loud.

Name the thing in the fifth film. The harassment film is the most direct of the five, because peer to peer sexual harassment in schools survives on being treated as banter. So it shows the behaviour as it happens, in a corridor and on a street outside school, and states that the victim is never to blame and that anything with unintended sexual suggestion still counts. It ends with three pupils knocking on three different doors.

Build it twice, properly. Every film is a full Welsh production, not a subtitle track. Separate scripts, a separate Welsh voice artist, separate builds. You can see it in the runtimes: the Welsh Foundation Phase film is thirteen seconds longer than the English, because Welsh takes longer to say. The disclosure film even localises its TED mnemonic into Welsh as Tyrd i ddweud, Eglura, Disgrifia, rather than leaving an English acronym stranded in a Welsh film.

Then rebuild the lot when the name changed. In 2023 Hafan Cymru became stori. Rather than leave a library of films ending on a defunct logo, we re-versioned all five in both languages: new end scenes, the redrawn Spectrum mark, the landscape Welsh Government funding lockup, and new destinations. Ten masters, rebuilt to order, so a teacher opening any film in the series in 2024 sees the organisation that actually exists.

What it does for Hafan Cymru

A complete teaching resource that works without a facilitator in the room. The Spectrum team can run a session in either language, in any school in Wales, at three different age levels, and staff have their own film for the moment a child actually tells them something. Every film ends by pointing at Childline or Live Fear Free, so a child who watches one alone still knows where to go.

It worked. The series is still in use across Welsh schools, and Stori, as Hafan Cymru is now known, has commissioned a further run of films for 2027.

Credits

• Client: Hafan Cymru, for the Spectrum Project, now trading as stori
• Funder: Welsh Government, credited on screen
• Studio: Alchemy, then trading as Tiny Wizard Studio
• Series: five films, 2021 to 2022, all re-versioned in both languages in 2023
• Languages: English and Welsh throughout, each a separate production
• Welsh translation on the three school films: BLA Translation
• Formats: 3840 x 2160 for Foundation Phase, 1920 x 1080 for the rest
• Guidance credited on screen: the four Rs, from the British Council