The Digitally Connected studio was focused on making animations about the Youth and Media for the symposium held at Harvard two months ago. We worked to make an animation about the connection between social media and anxiety in our society. The message was not meant to steer consumers away from the use of social media, just to be aware of the effects in can have on you if you use it in a certain way. We spent a lot of time building our story boad and writing our script to prepare everything before we started the animations.

We used Adobe Illustrator to design our characters and scenes and Adobe After Effects to animate those designs. We had never used these programs before so they took a little while to get used to.

Figuring out all of the little details of the animation like the transitions and colors was a challenge for us in the beginning. It took us a few extra days to get acclamated to the new software and get in the proper mindset of how to go about a project like this. Throughout the rest of the studio we made a lot of great strides in our animations and weren't terribly far off from finishing on time. On the last day of the studio, we were asked to change the end of our animation which would require us to take too much time out of the next studio, so it remained incomplete for the rest of the studio.

We ended up finishing the animation for our final project. It took us the entire independent project period in addition to some late afternoons at NuVu, but we finished it. The second time around was easier because we were already used to the software, aware of our storyline, and what needed to get done when. Using this extra time to finish it has helped because we now have a finish project that we're proud of from this studio.

We made an animation to represent how social media provokes anxiety in modern society. The idea wasn't to get people to turn away from social media, rather to show them the effects it can have on you if used excessively.

As teenagers in this modern world, we're as guilty as anyone of using our smart phones too much. We wanted to express the feelings we have about how these technologies have affected us, both positively and negatively. This video is meant to be somewhat of a reality check to ourselves and our peers about what's important when using social media and what we can all do with out.