At We Are Cognitive, we are use the power of explainer animations to help people share messages the world needs to hear. Messages like that of We Free Women fit this bill perfectly, and we felt honoured to work with We Free Women. We are proud of our team and very grateful to our Project Manager Team Leader Becki Lane-Newman for connecting us with We Free Women Founder Tamzin Outhwaite, making this collaboration possible. This is a blog written by We Free Women that goes into more detail about their mission and the explainer animation we made together.
Life is far from easy for many women across the UK. They face pressures and challenges from which there is often little respite, with women consistently reporting higher levels of burnout than men. In a world recovering from the damage wrought by covid and the added struggles created by the oppressive cost of living, the opportunities for many women to get a break from these and the other factors impacting their life are small.
Seeing all of this, and her own capacity to make a difference, our founder Tamzin Outhwaite created We Free Women. Today We Free Women is run by a dedicated group of volunteers and creates fully funded retreat that provide restorative activities and space to give women room to breathe, reflect and recharge.
Of course, launching a not-for-profit with the bold mission to run fully funded retreats for women takes a village – and since our launch in March 2023, the volunteer co-founders of We Free Women have been blessed to have met so many like minded people, and received so many donations and offers of support from visionary brands and businesses that share our philosophy of paying it forward.
One of these companies is We Are Cognitive, an explainer animation studio who have supported our movement since our inception and who offered us support in the form of an animation that communicated our story, our mission and the numerous ways to get involved.
Last week we received the final product and it is a thing of beauty that moved us all deeply and truly captured our essence. Working with the talented and committed team at Cognitive was a dream - their thorough yet light touch, their process of listening to founder Tamzin Outhwaite share the origin story and the cofounders share how we changed lives on our first retreat - everything was beautifully expressed through animation.
To have such a talented team give their time to our grassroots movement was hugely encouraging and we cannot thank you enough for how they brought We Free Women - and everything we stand for - to life. With the launch of this animation, the work of our incredible team the support of brands and businesses, we are excited for what the future holds and the women we will be able to help.
If you would like to get involved, put forward a woman in your life for one of our retreats or donate to our mission, we would love to hear from you. Visit our website to do all of this and to find out more about We Free Women!
Life is far from easy for many women across the UK. In a world recovering from the damage wrought by covid and the added of struggles created by the oppressive cost of living, the opportunities for many women to get a break from these and the other factors impacting their life are small.
Professor Ray Laurence talks about the ways translating his research into explainer videos with Cognitive has dramatically increased the reach of his work and triggered debate among people across the world.
The University of Manchester’s findings linked microplastics to another big problem, sewage discharges into rivers. Their findings had far reaching implications, what we shared through whiteboard animation.
The Charivari is returning and our whiteboard animation for Strange Cargo, celebrating them, way they work with communities and telling their story.
Nothing lives in isolation, and Sir Ken draws on several connected threads as he explains the scale of opportunity and reset this moment gives us. We’ve unpicked these threads in this blog as we think about the gantlet Sir Ken leaves us with, to seize the opportunity and create a new sort of normal.
In this blog, Andrew and Dan take us through some of their most meaningful and memorable moments during the making of Sir Ken Robinson’s ‘A Future For Us All’.
In this blog, Andrew reflects on the origins of whiteboard animation, the RSA Animates and the journey that led to the creation of this new series, Talk To The Hand.
While we work with clients to carefully select the ideal voiceover artist for each whiteboard animation, we must confess to having a few favourites!
We've been wanting to make one of these for quite a while and it gives us the opportunity to go behind the scenes, and explore the creative process of creating the latest RSA whiteboard video.
Read about our Senior Creative Sarah Verrall’s experience of bringing the vision and mission of CIRAD to life in our whiteboard animation for them.
This year the RSA have won in the Webby Awards’ animation category for their RSA Shorts series. To celebrate this achievement, we asked the RSA’s Mairi Ryan and Abi Stephenson about the series and sharing ideas more broadly.
It’s hard to work on so many whiteboard animations and not develop a few personal favourites. We put some of our team on the spot to get theirs.
Condensing more than 260 years of history into one mural is no mean feat. In this post Cognitive founder and mural artist Andrew Park talks about the experience of creating it and the events he and RSA Historian Anton Howes have held.
Professor Ray Laurence talks about the ways translating his research into explainer videos with Cognitive has dramatically increased the reach of his work and triggered debate among people across the world.
Black Holes might not seem to be visually engaging at the outset. Ultimately there’s not a lot to work with when you think of a hole that swallows light so nothing can be seen. But for Cognitive this is exactly the sort of challenge we love. Hear from Andrew Park about how he and the team visually translated Prof Hawking’s final Black Hole theory of Supertranslations.
Read about the new whiteboard animation film we made for Cynthia Hall Productions for the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development and how we applied our visual thinking to explain attachment theory and the technique of TBRI (Trust Based Relational Intervention)
Continuing our series of animated explainer videos for the North American Forest Partnership, we explore ‘Wildfire’; the effects it has on the forest and what can be done by local communities to manage it.
I have over the past few weeks been doing just that - looking back at the catalogue of work we have made for the RSA Animate series to get a sense of the here and now.
Every explainer animation we create is a collaboration between us and our clients. Guided by each client’s essence, goals and message, we create scripted and visual storytelling that is informative, engaging, memorable and relatable. The result is a carefully crafted and bespoke explainer animation.