Thursday 2nd October 2025

Eddy Altman– physician, climate scientist, CTO of Creative Conscience

“Saving our planet is now a communications challenge” Sir David Attenborough

Creative Conscience is a non-profit organisation focused on making art/ creative ideas focused around themes such as environment, sustainability, public health etc. Some of the projects we were shown were really effective short animations while others social media campaigns or business ideas all centred on climate or another type of social issue.

Our first activity was to list some of out passions, together we came up with:

• Cooking
• Animation/ Comics
• Language Learning
• Zines
• Collecting things
• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Then we juxtaposed them with a list of complaints we had, some were small, some were big but they were certainly never-ending

Complaints:

• UAL
• far right movements
• McDonald’s
• Flatmates
• Being so far away from my friends
• ******
• the weather
• climate change denial

At the end, Eddy told us a very personal story about his dad’s cancer which was really quite moving. I appreciated that he opened up to us about his drive to make Creative Conscience keep running as it showed us further that this was more than just a job to them.

I started thinking about what social issues I would be motivated to try and tackle if I were to do a self initiated project. One thing that I thought was relevant to people in my life and in my local area was awareness about Sickle cell anaemia. Sickle cell is very common in people of African and Caribbean descent, both diasporas are a big part of South London’s population and culture. Unfortunately, because of a long history of medical abuse and more stigmas, many Afro-Caribbean people are hesitant to donate blood which is vital for those with the disease. On a more personal level, a friend of mine passed away due to sickle cell at age 19, and I hope that an increase of awareness could potentially minimise the amount of people who have to experience what him and his family felt.

While I’m not sure whether I will go ahead with the self initiated project, but it has encouraged me to start thinking about what I could do for my community using the skills I have. Even if it’s not done with Creative Conscience, it’s worth having a think about in the future.

And Then…

Although I wasn’t going to be directing my own Self Initiated Project, I instead chose to help Amy, Jocasta and Trisha on their project. Because I didn’t do the backgrounds route on Isobel Stenhouse’s I chose to help out on doing backgrounds for their project. Their project focuses on an anti generative AI theme, which is something I really care about so it felt natural to hop on board.

The area where I started out designing was the office, which surprisingly turned out to be quite a challenge. I tried to reference the storyboard and the mood board that they had sent for it. Turns out trying to plan the inside of an office in regards to how much space people need is actually quite difficult.

Getting feedback on how things might or might not work was very rewarding, as everything was a bit like a puzzle that I had to solve. If the cubicles are too narrow they need to be widened, but if they’re widened then the corridor over on one side is too narrow for someone to naturally go through. Before the project took a break, this was the before and after of the cubicles. I’m excited to go back to it and create a fully finished piece.

Additional concept art for the tub carriage featured in the animatic.