ChildLine is a telephone helpline in the UK for children to call if they are worried about child abuse.

But the calls are confidential, so very few people know anything about how they play out. This makes raising money for the service a challenge.We met this challenge with a simple idea – recreate a call so the audience could hear what the children say and how the counselors help.But this left us with an even bigger challenge. How to visualize the call.The answer lay in animation.To represent the voices of the child and the counselor, we created two waveforms and placed them in an abstract environment. This treatment was influenced by the graphics of an oscilloscope.

To create the nervous child’s voice, we developed a plug-in that evaluated and responded to the actual audio track.This allowed the animation to be exaggerated with jittery movement, reacting to the inflections and deflections in the child’s voice.The result is an abstract visualization of the reality of a call to ChildLine, that not only raised much-needed funds, but put helped the public understand what ChildLine does.