Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity Turns Face Masks Into Moving Art
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity launched a stop-motion film in December 2020, built from more than 400 unique hand-printed cloth masks arranged in sequence to create the world's first animated COVID face mask, raising funds for children's medical research in the United Kingdom through an Indiegogo campaign timed to Giving Tuesday.
The project, titled "First," emerged from the creative imagination of Yannis Konstantinidis, founder and creative director of production company NOMINT. Rather than produce a conventional public service appeal, Konstantinidis recruited an international roster of animation directors — among them Giant Ant, Ori Toor, Henrique Barone, Clim Studio, Rafael Varona, and Dario Imbrogno — and invited each to contribute original artwork that would become a single frame, or a sequence of frames, within a larger stop-motion composition. Each individual cloth mask represented one frame, so that when the masks were filmed in sequence using stop-motion technique, they cohered into a single continuous animated work.
The timing was deliberate. Launching in conjunction with Giving Tuesday on 1 December 2020, the campaign positioned charitable purchase as an act of solidarity at the precise cultural moment when face masks had become both a daily necessity and a contested symbol across the United Kingdom and beyond. Proceeds from the sale of the masks and associated artworks were donated directly to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity, supporting medical care and research for children — research that, as the charity noted, had been significantly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign sits within the Public Interest category and carries a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100, reflecting strong creative distinction and purposeful charitable mechanics.
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity recognised a cultural tension at the heart of pandemic life. The face mask had become a compulsory but frequently unwelcome object — associated in public discourse with restriction, anxiety, and loss of normalcy. The "First" campaign inverted that meaning entirely, reframing the cloth mask as a canvas for joy, colour, and collective artistic expression.
This approach reflects a broader strategic pattern in UK charitable fundraising: the most effective public interest campaigns do not simply solicit donations but create participatory objects or experiences that carry emotional value independent of their charitable function. In the United Kingdom, voluntary-sector income reached £56.9 billion in 2020/21, according to data cited by Charity Digital, though that figure represented a 6% real-terms decline from the previous year — a contraction that placed pressure on charities to develop fundraising mechanisms capable of cutting through a saturated digital appeals environment. Individual giving accounted for £26.4 billion, or 47% of total UK charity sector income in that period, according to the same source.
GOSH Charity operates in a competitive landscape alongside major UK children's charities. Barnardo's reported £296.4 million in total income for the year ended 31 March 2020, according to the Charity Commission register, while Action for Children reported £147.65 million in total income for a comparable period, according to Actionforchildren Org Uk. Against peers of that scale, GOSH Charity's decision to pursue a design-led, limited-edition merchandise model — rather than a mass-media donation drive — represented a differentiated strategy, targeting an audience that responds to craft and cultural relevance rather than emotional urgency alone. The Indiegogo mechanism further allowed the campaign to function as both a fundraising vehicle and a proof-of-concept for charitable creativity during a period of acute public need.
Yannis Konstantinidis began by testing the concept on disposable masks, designing keyframes directly on the mask surface and photographing them to verify that printed animation sequences would read legibly at the scale and curvature of a wearable cloth object. That iterative prototyping process shaped every subsequent production decision, from the choice of printing method to the selection of a denim outer layer and cotton inner lining that would hold colour, maintain structure under filming conditions, and remain functional as a garment.
Each contributing director — including Henrique Barone, who serves as an animation director at Giant Ant — delivered completed 2D animation sequences to Konstantinidis, who then adapted each file to the specific geometry of the mask template before sending artwork to print. Barone, who used Dragonframe stop-motion software to film the assembled mask sequence, described his own motivation in terms that illuminate the campaign's wider creative logic, stating: "I was very interested in exploring how I could use the facemask, a weird new staple of modern life, which has many negative associations, as a canvas to create something positive and meaningful," as reported by Animation Express. Across the collaborating studios and individual directors, production tools included Procreate, Photoshop, Adobe Animate, and After Effects, according to Animation World Network, reflecting the genuinely distributed nature of the production pipeline.
The resulting stop-motion film, built from more than 400 unique printed cloth masks, prioritised visual warmth and whimsy — qualities that Konstantinidis identified as essential to the campaign's ambition of instilling hope and positivity at a moment of prolonged collective stress. Production credits for the campaign's agency of record are not publicly documented; creative origination is attributed entirely to NOMINT and its collaborating directors. Stash Media documented the production process and final film in its coverage of the project.
No verified third-party performance data quantifying total funds raised, masks sold, or Indiegogo campaign totals for "First" is publicly available at the time of writing. What the public record does confirm, as documented by campaignsoftheworld.com, stashmedia.tv, awn.com, and bizcommunity.com, is that the campaign achieved meaningful industry visibility — securing coverage across animation trade press and creative industry platforms in the United Kingdom and internationally, an outcome that extended the charitable reach of the project beyond the Indiegogo audience.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on three compounding mechanisms. First, the object itself — a limited-edition, artist-made cloth mask — carried inherent desirability that converted supporters into active purchasers rather than passive donors. Second, the Giving Tuesday launch window aligned charitable impulse with an established calendar moment, reducing the friction of solicitation. Third, the stop-motion film generated shareable narrative content capable of travelling independently of the fundraising page, functioning as organic awareness media for both the project and Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity itself.
The campaign's lineage within GOSH Charity's broader fundraising evolution is also instructive. In 2017, digital fundraising work with Torchbox generated more than £25,000 in e-commerce revenue from paid search activity, an 84% increase over 2016, according to Torchbox. The "First" project extended that e-commerce orientation into an entirely creative-led product category, suggesting an institutional appetite for innovation in charitable merchandise. The Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 reflects the campaign's originality of concept, quality of craft, and clarity of charitable purpose — while acknowledging that the absence of disclosed performance metrics limits full assessment of real-world fundraising impact.
The GOSH Charity "First" campaign is the world's first animated COVID face mask, created by NOMINT's Yannis Konstantinidis in December 2020. It used stop-motion animation across more than 400 unique cloth masks to raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity in the United Kingdom through an Indiegogo campaign launched on Giving Tuesday.
Each cloth mask represented one animation frame. Contributing directors including Henrique Barone, Ori Toor, Clim Studio, and Rafael Varona delivered 2D animations to Yannis Konstantinidis, who adapted and printed each design onto a denim-and-cotton mask. Barone then filmed the masks in sequence using Dragonframe stop-motion software to produce the final animated film.
Yannis Konstantinidis, founder and creative director of production company NOMINT, originated and led the project. He collaborated with an international group of animation directors, including Giant Ant, Henrique Barone, Ori Toor, Clim Studio, Rafael Varona, and Dario Imbrogno, all working together to benefit Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity in the United Kingdom.
Giving Tuesday, held on 1 December 2020, provided an established charitable giving moment that aligned audience intent with the campaign's fundraising mechanics. Launching on that date allowed the Indiegogo campaign to reach supporters already primed to donate, amplifying the project's reach for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The masks were non-medical grade. Positioned as charitable art objects and functional everyday cloth masks, they were not intended as personal protective equipment. Each mask was constructed with a denim outer layer and cotton inner lining, designed to hold vibrant printed animation sequences while remaining wearable and durable for supporters purchasing them to benefit GOSH Charity.
The "First" campaign received a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the project's originality of concept — the world's first animated COVID face mask — its quality of stop-motion craft, and the clarity of its public interest purpose, balanced against the absence of publicly disclosed fundraising performance data for the December 2020 United Kingdom campaign.
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