The Client
The Malnutrition Taskforce is a national coalition of organisations working to prevent and reduce malnutrition among older people, a serious and widely underestimated public health issue affecting an estimated one in ten people over 65 in the UK. The Taskforce brings together health and social care organisations to share best practice, influence policy and develop resources that support those involved in the care of older people.
As part of their commitment to providing practical, accessible guidance, the Taskforce commissioned Nutmeg Productions to create an animation that could raise awareness of malnutrition in the elderly among the carers, health professionals and family members who are best placed to identify and address it.
The Brief
The brief was to create an animation that would help people recognise the signs of malnutrition in older people they know or care for, and understand what to do about it. The challenge was to make a subject that can feel clinical and abstract feel personal and real, without being alarming or disempowering.
The Taskforce wanted a film rooted in genuine human experience rather than statistics, something that would resonate emotionally as well as informationally, and that their network of health and social care professionals would want to share and use in their own settings.
Our Approach
We built the film around the true story of an elderly person who had unwittingly become malnourished, a narrative choice that gave the animation an emotional anchor and made the issue immediately relatable to anyone who has a parent, grandparent or patient in later life.
Our illustrator developed a bespoke visual world for the film built around a domestic setting, an older person’s home, with objects that carry quiet emotional weight: family photographs, old-fashioned weighing scales, familiar kitchen items. This grounding in recognisable domestic detail gave the animation a warmth and specificity that a more diagrammatic or clinical approach would have missed entirely.
The combination of an honest human narrative, bespoke illustration and a calm, accessible voiceover created a film that communicates clearly without creating anxiety, exactly the balance the brief required.
The Result
The Malnutrition Taskforce animation has become a key resource within the Taskforce’s education and awareness programme, used by health and social care professionals, carers and community organisations to recognise and respond to malnutrition in older people across the UK.
The film demonstrates the particular value of animation for health education: it can tell a true human story, illustrate a clinical reality and provide practical guidance within the same short piece, without putting a real, vulnerable person in front of a camera.
Client
Malnutrition Taskforce
Film Director
Harry Chambers
Illustration and Animation
Daryl Higgins
Producer
Isabel Campbell
Voice Over & Sound Design
Cia Allan