What needed explaining

Parliament of Victoria needed a clear and engaging way to explain key parliamentary processes for students, teachers and the wider Victorian public.

The series needed to make topics such as law-making, committees and petitions easier to understand, while remaining accurate, useful and suitable for education audiences. The aim was to demystify how Parliament works and help people feel more able to understand and engage with democratic processes.

What I created

I created the How Parliament Works animated explainer series, with videos about Making Laws, Committees and Petitions. My role included shaping the scripts for animation, developing the visual approach, creating key iconography and visual metaphors, designing style frames, building animatics and animating the final videos.

For the "Making Laws" animation, I used three differently shaped keys as a visual metaphor for the stages a bill passes through before becoming law.

The visual approach

The visual style combines clean graphic design, playful motion, hand-crafted textures and details inspired by Victorian civic, natural and built environments.

Each scene uses visual metaphor to help the audience understand and remember the idea, rather than simply illustrating the narration. This is where animation is especially useful: it can show invisible structures, abstract processes and relationships between ideas in a way traditional video often cannot.

The process

Each animation began by clarifying the message, audience and structure. From there, I refined the script for animation, developed visual concepts, created thumbnails and rough sketches, then built style frames and an animatic with voice-over for review.

This gave the client a clear way to review the story, pacing and visual language before full animation began. It also helped keep the final piece accurate, engaging and easy to follow.