This Chilling Short Film Highlights How Social Media Can Hide Relationship Abuse

Spotting the signs of relationship abuse isn’t always easy. In fact, it’s the insidious nature of relationship abuse that is often the most dangerous.

That’s why One Love worked with creative studio Framestore to visualise their new campaign, ‘Behind The Post’, to help people recognize the warning signs of unhealthy relationships often hidden in plain sight.

The campaign includes a seven minute film directed by Rachel Macdonald from Tool of North America; a five minute film; two :30s; and an extended social campaign that includes ten videos for each warning sign with #behindthepost.

Framestore’s Design Studio created 3D text designs for signs such as ‘Jealousy’, ‘Guilting’ and ‘Isolation’, and overlaid them into the environments of the scenarios within the films. The longer form videos also included user-interface designs from Framestore to juxtapose the couple’s previously smitten text messages and social media posts, which only masked the underlying issues.

For Framestore’s Design Director Anthony Gibbs, the challenge came in balancing the subject matter and designs with sensitivity. ‘We didn’t want to distract from the subject matter’, says Gibbs. ‘Instead we worked to find an elegant way to incorporate the titles and the UI, without adding too many effects. It was important they sat naturally in the environments, to beautifully and subtly complement the nicely shot plates.’

Framestore utilised the Element 3D Video Copilot plugin from After Effects to create the 3D text whilst lighting, rendering and compositing at the same time. Texture patterns were mapped onto the 3D, which was then kerned. The fluid process allowed Framestore to get the perfect kerning for the type and roll the content into lighting and rendering most efficiently. Foundry’s Nuke software was used to track the text within the live-action shots.

The key was to create something modern, elegant and familiar, without feeling generic. Framestore’s Design team needed to communicate the idea of social media comments as validation of protagonist Zoe’s relationship. The animation of the comments was tuned to be subtle and complementary, whilst the animation of the UI feed was intended to feel human and natural, as Zoe scrolls through the memories covering the cracks in her relationship.

The ‘Behind The Post’ introductory video launches online with the 10 individual vignettes across One Love’s social channels. One Love is taking the campaign to high schools and colleges to be included in their curriculum along with a ‘Behind The Post’ discussion guide. The seven minute educational film will be also be available for access on the campaign.