Week 5/9 - UKAHT Live Brief
- Julia Toczyska
- Dec 13, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 15, 2025
At the beginning of week 5, we were introduced to our new Brief for the next couple of weeks. We were tasked to produce social media content to promote the 'Adopt a Penguin' campaign run by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. The challenge was to design engaging short form content for the campaign, highlighting awareness, education, and adoptions.
Project Plan
For this project, I have decided to pair up with some of my classmates in order to produce meaningful content. Before we delve any deeper, let's break down the tasks each and one of us had on the project:
Julia - scriptwriter, social media posts, visual direction
Leela - storyboard artist, personality breakdown, puppeteer
Conan - researcher, video editor, animator, voice actor
Will - music composer, video editor, funds manager
As a team, we developed team norms in order to maintain consistency in our progress. We made sure that every 2-3 days we would have meetings through discord where together we discussed our progress, as well as what we planned going forward. This helped us to set clear goals and come up with potential plan B’s if certain ideas had to be scrapped. Additionally, we have created progress documents to ensure each and one of us were on track:
Planning Phase
For this project, we have used a collaborative Miro board to explore ideas together, plan out our production, and take any relevant notes. I found it useful to report back on progress and explore our ideas collectively on Miro during meetings. It proved to me once again that visual planning is essential for my workflows.
During the second half of the week 5 lecture, we were joined by two representatives of the heritage, where we have discussed the brief in more detail as well as asked further questions. We outlined the most important details on the Miro board, these included details about the heritage itself as well as their work.
Demographic Overview
Before we began our work for the next couple of weeks, we had to address one important factor - who adopts a penguin? We have established our primary audience pretty quickly, that being "the givers". Looking over some research provided by UKAHT, they have outlined that the majority of people purchasing the 'Adopt a Penguin' pack tend to be older people, particularly around the Christmas season. And that makes quite a bit of sense! Grandparents tend to be the givers of the family, having a disposable income, and a charitable reputation. In a way, it is all about giving that meaningful gift to the younger generations, or loved ones.
Apart from establishing our primary target audience, we have also looked at alternatives - who else might find our product appealing? Well, we have established that teens, age 13-17, might! The rise of environmental awareness, and an ever-growing emphasis on social responsibility, makes the 'Adopt a Penguin' campaign stand out. We have established that these "influences" might be a perfect demographic for spreading the campaign further.
Concept Exploration
Before we committed to any visuals, our team spent a lot of time exploring different concept directions. UKAHT’s brief gave us room to be imaginative, but it also came with a responsibility - whatever we produced needed to feel authentic, on brand, and aligned with the charity’s mission. We developed several ideas, each with its own strengths, challenges, and completely different creative directions. Here’s a look at our thought process, what excited us, and why we ultimately chose the direction we did.
Each of these concepts came from different members of the team, mine being the documentary style skit and parody videos. I loved the idea of creating a series of short mockumentary videos where penguins study human behaviour, but looking back, it had some flaws. As fun as it was, it would’ve been difficult to tie the idea back to the heritage in a meaningful way. In the end, we decided to take the strongest elements from several concepts and merge them into one cohesive direction, allowing us to carry forward the best parts of each idea.
Finalised Concept
Eventually, we gravitated toward a concept that felt both charming and deeply connected to UKAHT’s mission, that being a series of social media posts and educational videos featuring a fictional character: Parsley the penguin.
Our concept aimed to present Parsley as a friendly, expressive ambassador for Antarctic heritage, someone (or somepenguin) who could draw viewers in, make them smile, and subtly guide them toward learning more or supporting the campaign. It is personal, festive, and undeniably charming. And most importantly, it puts the audience at the centre of the experience, inviting them to share a moment with Parsley and feel connected to a cause that matters.
Visual Tone
During the early stages of the pre-production period, I took some time with Leela to develop the visual tone for this project. To split things up, I focused on moodboarding while Leela worked on concept sketches. Within the moodboard, I wanted to capture a specific feeling, that Christmas morning nostalgia, a sense of winter wonder, and a warm charitable tone. I used a selection of images from classic Christmas movies, puppet shows, and magical snowy landscapes as I believe these best capture the vision I had in mind. This early stage helped us define a palette, atmosphere, and emotional tone that carried through the rest of the project.
While I worked on setting the tone, Leela went ahead to collaboratively create some sketches with us. She introduced us to an online platform called Magma, a collaborative drawing board, allowing multiple users to sketch simultaneously. The idea was to establish not only who Parsley is, but his overall presence.
The Script
Apart from moodboarding, I took charge of writing the script for our video. I made many iterations of the script, however, in the end I stuck with something that not only entertains but also educates. I had a lot of fun with the script, taking inspiration from shows such as the Bear in the Big Blue House, and other childrens television shows from the late 90s.
Finalised Script
The Story Board
Based on the script, Leela moved on to sketching out a visual story board using my ideas. I cannot stress enough how much I love this story board, it gives so much personality to the character. Although we didn't opt for a frame by frame animation, it makes me wonder what if we had more time to really go out on this project. Despite all, I do believe this was an essential phase of setting the tone for this project. In a way, it made Parsley truly come to life for us.
Acquiring Parsley
To really set in with the 90s TV atmosphere, we opted to acquire an actual puppet that embodies that era of childrens television. We were going back and forth on finding the ideal puppet for this project, ideally we would have created one ourselves, but it was impossible to do so within the time frame. In the end, we set on purchasing this little guy from Amazon. It was a tough one, as we are aware this is not specifically the Gentoo penguin the heritage asked for, but we fell in love of the character so much we decided to take on the risk.
Filming & Photography
Our content centred around photos and footage of Parsley, which we shot on a green screen using the equipment we have booked out prior from media services. The only hiccup? We never quite figured out the lighting setup. Despite our best efforts, the pure white lighting we wanted came out slightly yellow, which gave Parsley a warm glow that he absolutely did not sign off on. This became a bigger problem during editing… but we will get onto it in just a bit. Originally, I wans't meant to take charge of filming, however, I was happy to step up and fill in the role for my team members. While my strenghts primarly lie in post-production, I tried my absolute best to provide my team with high quality footage, and despite the hiccups I hope the final product is up to standard. The filming process took us some trial and error, especially figuring out how we could hold the puppet in front of the camera, but eventually we managed to get through the script entirely.
Cleaning Up Parsley (Literally)
When post-production week arrived, I got to work on editing the photos for the social media posters. After removing the green screen using Colour Range and tidying up the rough edges, the yellow tint bothered me enough that I ended up reworking the images entirely. Using the selection tool, I isolated Parsley’s beak and eyelids, made them more vibrant, and then converted the whole background layer to clean black and white. There was also a strange glow around his eyes, which I removed by redrawing them entirely, something I didn’t expect to be doing for a silly penguin plush, but here we are. I repeated this process for every single photograph, which was time consuming but definitely worth it. Parsley looked much sharper and consistent with the overall tone we were aiming for.
Poster Design & Animation
Originally, I planned to animate the posters in After Effects… until I realised that my poor laptop was already struggling with Photoshop alone. Since I was away during production week and needed something lightweight yet flexible, I decided to give Adobe Express a go, and honestly, it surprised me. Not only did it run smoothly, but it also gave me access to a great library of stock assets. Even more importantly, it made it easy to merge in UKAHT’s existing brand assets, which helped me stay completely on brand and maintain the look and feel of their social media presence. Once I found compositions I liked, I animated each asset individually. The animations were subtle, just enough to give each poster some life and make the visuals more eye catchy than a static post. By the end, I created three different posters.
Looking back, I am not fully satisfied with the first one, mostly because I didn’t have a strong direction from the start, so it never quite clicked (but I might be overly critical on myself). The postcard style poster turned out much stronger for its diegetic visuals, I thought integrating Parsley into the postcard itself would be a nice touch. And finally, the Christmas themed poster was easily my favourite to work on. I have really enjoyed giving Parsley a little Christmas themed outfit. I found a stock asset that let me place images inside a laptop screen, which sparked an idea - I wanted it to look as if Parsley was FaceTiming his audience from his little Antarctic home.
Overall, I would give Adobe Express a solid pass. It is a fun program to experiment with on the go, but doesn't give much depth beyond the basics. I had a lot of fun creating these though! Especially looking through the assets and coming up with a range of ideas based on what I could find. My favourite part of creating these posters was definitively coming up with the headings, I believe I managed to integrate my own sense of lighthearted humour pretty well, if I do say so myself! It is important to note that all the text used is fitted within UKAHT brand guidelines, meaning that the font as well as HEX colours are accurate to UKAHT's branding, pretty neat!
Final Video
Final Social Media Posts
Social Media Mock-Ups
Final Thoughts
This brief pushed me in all the right ways. We went through a wide range of concepts before we finally landed on a great idea. I won’t lie, there were moments where I questioned whether puppetry style videos and complex animations was slightly too ambitious for the time frame (spoiler it was). But somehow, through a mix of late nights, stubbornness, and a surprising number of retakes involving Parsley the penguin, everything came together.
Despite juggling a variety of techniques and reworking ideas multiple times, I genuinely enjoyed the process. I discovered how much I love character driven storytelling, and how much expression you can pull from something as simple as a silly puppet. It reminded me why I enjoy this kind of work so much. There is something extremely rewarding about bringing a character to life, even in a tiny clip and a range of posters. In the end, I hope this work reflects not just our team effort, but also my personal love for storytelling. Parsley may be small, but he's mighty, and I am genuinely excited to carry that growth into whatever I create next.
Team Dynamics
Everyone on my team poured their absolute all into the project. We had to scrap some content as we went along, but through consistant communication we were able to come up with alternatives. Whenever group members were unable to deliver on a certain tasks, others stepped up and supported one another. For example when intially one of the team members planned to create 3D envioriments inside blender, I encouraged to change the task to 2D animated backgrounds based on scheduling concerns, and redistributed the tasks when needed. Likewise, while not originally tasked with filimg I was happy to take on the role when others couldn't make it on site. Overall, we all managed to contribute in a meaningful way into projects execution, and I am proud of the final outcome.
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