Mermaids is a UK charity that supports trans youth and their families. In 2025, they’re celebrating their 30th birthday. We at Chicken Fruit were delighted to be able to make an animation showcasing some of the incredible ways Mermaids help to provide support, engagement and advocacy to the trans community.
You can support Mermaids by donating via their website, where you can also read more about the services they provide to trans, non-binary and gender-diverse young people and their families. You can also chat to the team directly on their support line or webchat Mon–Fri 1pm–8:30pm.
Behind The Scenes
We first spoke to the Mermaids team in late October 2024. At that time, the brief was quite open – we and the Mermaids team just knew we wanted to show ways the Mermaids charity supports gender-diverse young people to grow their confidence and community.
Deciding on a Concept
With this in mind, we put together three ideas:
an abstract concept that used isolated islands connecting together as a metaphor for an expanding community;
a more literal depiction of a young person moving through the Mermaids services as they age;
a concept that showed a young person developing their artistic abilities alongside their self-expression and confidence.
After chatting through these concepts with the Mermaids team, we all agreed it would be best to focus directly on the help that Mermaids can provide. We decided to go with the more literal depiction.
During this early stage, we also experimented with some character designs, stepping outside of our comfort zone to play with proportions and style as a way of expressing the joyful vibe we were aiming for.
Ultimately, we all decided to keep the character design simpler so as not to distract from the message we wanted to portray – and also to better show the main characters ageing throughout the film.
After another round of discussions with the Mermaids team, we started to develop the idea for the video.
Idea Development
Even though we were focused on a more literal portrayal, we still wanted some abstract visuals for the very first shot to represent the potential turmoil and isolation a young person might feel before reaching out to Mermaids. We did this with a swirling background of blue and pink that calms once the young person has contacted the Mermaids webchat. A bonus of this depiction was also that, with the character wearing a white hoodie, the video opens with the colours of the trans flag 🏳️⚧️
We passed our storyboards to Mermaids for feedback to make sure our scenes were as accurate as possible, and they in turn sent them to their Trans Youth Advisory Panel to make sure we were representing their story at every step.
We initially designed the main character of our animation to be gender-neutral, so any young person could interpret the main character as representing them. However, Mermaids and the Trans Youth Advisory Panel suggested it might be better to have a slightly more femme character, so we adapted our design to show a character incorporating more feminine styles and clothing as they aged and got more confident.
Animatic + Styleframes
The animatic (the “PowerPoint version of the animation” as we call it) is incredibly useful to help develop camera movements, rough animation and staging. We usually film reference footage at this stage, too, to make sure our sense of timing is accurate.
We also find styleframes to be hugely valuable to do at an early stage to get a solid idea of what the final version will look like. It’s easy to assume something is possible, only to be stumped when actually making the final version. (It’s also very handy in giving a client peace of mind when all they’ve seen so far are sketches and ugly animatics.)
Character Rig
Because a main focus of the Mermaids charity is young people, we wanted to show how a young person could be supported at all ages. For this, we wanted a character rig that could start off younger, then age through their teens and into young adulthood.
As the character ages, their face shape lengthens, their limbs get thinner and, of course, they get taller.
We also wanted it to be adaptable so we could use it for the supporting cast too – and show some variation in body types and gender expressions.
2D Elements
For the style of the video, we wanted a mixed-media approach, incorporating 2D and 3D techniques to represent that there isn’t just one way of embarking on this journey, but also to have a joyful, playful energy.
Some of these were easy to do! The striped texture on our main character’s T-shirt during the Mango group call scene was an easy parenting of a 2D texture within After Effects, for example. But others were a bit more challenging.
Here at Chicken Fruit, we’re still using Cinema4D for our 3D work, but (along with the rest of the industry) we’ve been eyeing Blender for a little while now for its capacity to make more stylised renders than C4D is capable of.
One of the Blender tools we’re really yearning for is Grease Pencil. Especially after making a 3D animated short film and ending up hand-drawing pretty much every frame, we’re desperately chasing the high of easily incorporating pencil lines into our 3D models.
For this project, we still didn’t use Grease Pencil, but neither did we hand-draw each pencil line, at least. To get the sort of look we wanted within C4D’s Redshift, we ended up drawing splines directly onto our 3D characters, then stylising them with a displacement and a noise texture. Obviously, this was pretty render intensive, so we’re creeping ever closer to biting the bullet and switching to Blender, but we’re fairly satisfied with the final look.
Background Characters
We also had fun developing the supporting cast, and assigned most of the main cast a colour of the rainbow based off the excellent Mermaids brand guidelines.
We also couldn’t help but give everyone their own backstory in our heads. For example, we have a whole Blue family on their own journey in the background – in the second shot, you can see Blue Mum at a Mermaids family day, then later you see Blue Mum and Blue Kid at a Transcend meeting, then both of them together at Pride.
Mermaids also gave us a library of real handmade signs created by young trans people that we could reference in the final shot. Other Easter eggs we included: basic versions of posters sold in the Mermaids store, a Mermaids backpack, a Mango hoodie, and a reference to a campfire scene we included in our initial storyboards, but which got cut for time.
The Portrait/Landscape Conundrum
We’re beginning to reluctantly accept that many projects these days require a portrait version for social media. Previously we’ve tackled this by making our 16:9 project as normal, then doing a grumpy last-minute portrait version by repositioning everything and re-rendering.
We figured now was as good a time as any to tackle the Portrait Problem. Instead of making two versions of this project – landscape and portrait – we made one giant square 1920x1920 version with a template overlay showing:
A square guideline
Instagram’s new 3:4 thumbnail guideline
a 9:16 portrait guideline
a guideline showing the actual safe zone of Insta/Tiktok videos, because for some outrageous reason you can’t disable the caption and like/share/etc buttons
a normal 16:9 landscape guideline.
This added a bit of complexity to the initial laying out of shots, but ultimately gave us much more flexibility when exporting.
You can download the guideline template we made here, if you like!
Music
We were thrilled to be able to work with Reeder once again on the music for this project. After working with them on two projects for Greenpeace (as well as another unreleased project that will hopefully be dropping in early summer 👀), we knew we could trust them to make something perfect – which, of course, they did, effortlessly matching the upbeat, optimistic tone we were looking for.
It really was such a privilege to be able to work on a project to uplift the amazing work that Mermaids do. What started in 1995 as a small group of concerned parents has turned into an incredible organisation that helps young people and their families to get information, to be listened to and understood, to form a community and to make a difference in the world. And not to mention, the team we were liaising with were perfect clients, full of obvious care and passion for the work they do – and they even asked us to cut a shot during production! That never happens!! AND they sent us this beautiful amigurumi Mermaid, which now lives on our studio shelves and makes us smile whenever we look up from our screens.
As a reminder, the Mermaids support line and web chat are open Mon–Fri, 1pm–8:30pm. You can also support them by donating, following them on social media and/or signing up to their mailing list.
We’re sure you know this already, but just in case: Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans rights are human rights.
Peace and love ✌️🏳️⚧️
