“Humour is more effective than fear”: Nice and Serious says Touch Yourself for World Cancer Day

London-based creative agency Nice and Serious has launched a campaign to raise awareness for breast cancer detection, choosing to grab people’s attention with comedy. Touch Yourself features a cheeky animated campaign film and illustration-heavy microsite, exploring the ways people can check for cancer and, in turn, the wonderful range of human shapes and sizes.

“The resources we found online were quite clinical,” explains one of the team’s creatives Jade Evans, “so we wanted to create an animation that was helpful and fun.” Editor Serafima Serafimova continues: “We strongly believe that spreading awareness using humour is much more effective than using fear.”

Created in-house, the campaign embraces the various aesthetic approaches of the animation and film team including Jade, Serafima, Giulia Bavagnoli and Guillaume Le Roux. Rather than trying to create a congruous visual style, the film represents the eclectic human form with its similarly disparate illustration techniques, from the more realistic and sketchy to the heavily stylised. As a passion project done in-between client work, the team used the opportunity to experiment and step out of its comfort zone, using processes like cel animation and rotoscoping for the first time.

Its colour scheme also varies and aims to exaggerate the playful imagery. “We began by choosing five colours to work with, bright and bold to fit with the theme. This was a great way to tie our varying styles together,” explains Serafima. “We avoided realistic skin tones, which actually allowed us to show diversity which was extremely important for us. This is also the reason why we made sure we featured women of all shapes, ages and sizes and included a man in the animation as well.”

The microsite launches today, ahead of World Cancer Day on 4 February.