Wonder Media and Split Studio on My Life is Worth Living

Conveying depression accurately can be a challenge, but the team at Wonder Media and their collaborators at Split Studio capture mental health with humanity in their new series, now available on YouTube. My Life Is Worth Living follows the story of four teenage characters, each with a mini-series based around a serious problem they face.

[This article is about a series which addresses suicide, self-harm, abuse and trauma. The team behind My Life is Worth Living compiled links to mental health resources on the production's website.]

The stories in these episodes may feel familiar to viewers, such as struggles in college, social media-induced anxiety, or living up to parents' expectations. They illustrate the important role support networks can play through the animated cast and their stories.

While the series isn’t afraid to touch on deeper issues, it’s never guilty of glorifying, glamorizing or trivializing these matters. Emily faces sexual abuse at home and feels trapped in her situation before confiding in a friend’s mother. After Kyle experiences cyberbullying, he grapples with his online anxieties spilling over into his real life sense of self. These are examples of how the series boldly tackles serious subject matter.

Read our interview with Wonder Media's Amanda Carson and Mark Baldo as well as Split Studio's Chico Zullo and Jonas Brandao below. The teams discuss the series’ stylish comic book aesthetic, and how they achieve subtlety during tender moments. They also share insights from the complex process of recording emotional scenes remotely with voice actors during a pandemic.

Hi! Please introduce My Life is Worth Living and the meaning behind the series.

Amanda: There were three major entities working on this project: The Cook Center for Human Connection, who funded the series and made it happen; Wonder Media, who I am a part of, and who Mark is working under; and then Split Studio, which is Jonas and Chico. The Cook Center's goal is to normalize the conversation around mental health. They wanted to do suicide prevention work, and their CEO Anne Brown got them connected with us. This series is very much in line with a lot of work we had been doing previously, a lot of which had to do with child abuse prevention.

We recently did a film called Are You Okay?, which focuses on bullying awareness and what bullying looks like now. So we got into working on My Life Is Worth Living, originally working with someone that we knew, Gabe Alvarado. Gabe had an inspiring story, where he had gone through an experience with a traumatic injury, and had started doing speaking engagements. We had become connected with him and his story. He had wanted to do something for kids: he wanted to do something either safety-related or mental health-related.

We were really struck by a story that he had brought up that happened when he was doing speaking engagements. He had people coming up to him, parents of teenagers, asking him, “with all you've been through, how do you get through it? How do you manage your day to day? How's your mental health? How can I talk to my child about what they're going through? Because I'm really struggling.”

This he was really struck by and we were really struck by it as well. The need for people to talk about this sort of thing, feeling inspired hearing somebody else's story. So that was a really compelling thing for us, and we started developing it with him. We got crowdfunding to expand the stories and then the Cook Center for Human Connection came in. They were really excited about the idea and allowed us to make it what it is, and expand one story into five main stories. We were really lucky to be able to do that. 

What we wanted to do is show a series following five characters that are in different journeys with their mental health, or at different risks for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, that have been affected by suicide differently. We wanted to show what the universalities are between those experiences. What is unique about those experiences? How can we connect people and normalize talking about these things, how can we make sure we're not afraid to bring up the word suicide? Making sure that we're not afraid to ask people if they've been thinking of taking their life or if they have experienced that.

Because this needs to be a major part of the larger mental health conversation. It always feels like this is the scariest subject for a lot of people to talk about. So there was a long development process; developing what stories we want to tell first, and deciding what the scenarios are that we want these kids to be going through. 

What sort of research in the fields of mental health and suicide went into the project?

Amanda: We worked with experts, such as Dr. James Mazza. He's a professor in the School of Psychology at University of Washington – Seattle, and is day-in-day-out working out how we manage the fact that the second leading cause of death in the United States, for ages 10-to-24, is suicide. What do we do about that? What tools can we give young people and the people that love them to make sure that that does not continue. So he was an incredible resource for this series.

He reviewed all of the writing material that we did, and we bounced ideas off of him. Our head writer Jordan, and myself, worked with a team of writers; assigning one writer for each of the arcs, so that we got separate voices for each of them. Then making sure that we could shake them all together, so they felt like the same series. It was a really difficult, but also a really wonderful experience. It’s also given us tools to talk about suicide, as it should. We hope that that is what other people are able to as well; after watching these conversations between these characters, identifying with them for whatever reason that they identify with them.

Mark: What Amanda and I say is that these are not the end of a conversation. These are the beginnings of a conversation. We want to normalize and destigmatize the conversation about mental health and suicide. 

Who is the series’ ideal target audience?

Mark: Wonder Media reached out to me and showed me the pitch document that they had created for this program. I've had long conversations with Amanda, with the team, and Wonder Media. The team wanted to reach a teenage audience, because that's who it is focused for. In that initial conversation, I said: “if you want to reach that audience, that is bombarded with so much stuff, we have to make it really interesting and visually stylish.”

I was looking at the character designs for the pitch document and I said: “you know, this would lend itself to be almost like an animated comic book.” So I started putting together visual pitches for the Wonder Media team, talking about how we need to turn out the characters and make that work with the background. Even at the time, the stories and the scripts didn't have a lot of motion, but it had a lot of emotion. We're going to try to tell a very dramatic story, very stylishly, in a way that’s visually interesting.

What techniques helped achieve this art style?

Mark: We wanted to bring the series to life with comic book styling, because this is animation, and it's a visual medium. I started drawing from anime sources for compositions. Things that we can do in animation that look very stylish, very cool, very dramatic, but that are not very technically difficult. There are simple ways to tell the story, just with simple camera drifts. Touching the camera for dramatic angle, and having someone in the extreme foreground and someone in the extreme backgrounds. We definitely started talking about who we were going to do this with, and how are we going to pull this off. Enter Jonas and the Split Studio team in Brazil…

Jonas: Split Studio has been in the business for 12 years now. Throughout that time, we've always worked with Toon Boom Harmony. I met with Toon Boom when I was still in college; I pitched a short film idea to François Lalonde, and he decided to give me some trial licenses so I could work on my film. When I started working in animation and started my company, we had no doubts we should go with Toon Boom. Since then, most of our productions are made in Toon Boom Harmony.

We've been doing TV shows for at least seven years now. This project specifically is something that is really important for us, because as a studio, we dedicate ourselves to a lot of social causes. As an example, we have a training program where a lot of people from poorer areas of Brazil are taught for free. Included in our productions, we have some people that worked on the show from that process. We've been doing for a few years now a show with public television in Brazil about sexual violence prevention for kids. The kind of work that Wonder Media does is very attractive to us, because it's not only an animated project. It's more than that. 

I think through the ability of our skills, we can make the world better. I think the things that we do have a huge capacity of achieving the attention of millions of people. So works like My Life Is Worth Living makes us think that we are doing the right thing as people. As our main show, we have our best artists and our best directors involved in My Life Is Worth Living. [Chico] Zullo is managing all of the creative aspects on our end. Even though we had worked with Wonder Media before, like Amanda said, on the short film, My Life Is Worth Living is a serial show, and because of that it requires a lot of technical resources. 

There are a lot of processes that we had to reinvent the way of doing, because the way we used to do things didn't work for the show. It's been a huge learning process for us, and I think everybody's very happy at Split with the way things are going and how we're handling the show. Everybody that's worked on it is very proud of being part of it.

Can you tell us more about what this project means to you?

Mark: I've been doing this for over 30 years now. I've worked on huge feature films, I've worked on small television commercials, and I've done 2D animation, 3D animation, computer generated stop-motion animation. All mediums of animation. I love animation. When I was looking at this, and I was really thinking about it, I was really drawing on my 30 years of experience in the industry to figure out the best way to represent the show.

When speaking to the Wonder Media folks, they opened up a new dimension to animation, where these animated stories could actually save someone's life. That's something that's completely new to me, and I was very excited to become part of it. That was the ultimate reason why, after speaking with Wonder Media, I agreed to take on the project.

Because, again, I've been doing this for a long time, I've been entertaining people for a long time, but the opportunity to use animation to actually save lives became incredibly appealing to me. I'm really very proud to be a part of it. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever add that to the equation of everything I've done. I guess I'm just very proud to be a part of it.

Amanda: In all the work that we've done as Wonder Media, leading up to this project in particular, that is the most surprising thing. But also it's what we’d hoped for. We've been working primarily with clients that want to create a YouTube presence for their prevention material. You actually get to see people's response and you get to see people interact with each other. When someone says that they're struggling, other people hop in and support them. That's the most amazing thing to see.

After you finish something like that, you get to give it to other people. You actually get to see them interact with it and engage with it. I feel like that's a really unique experience. Because there is obviously a ton of life-changing art and media that exists, but you don't always get to really see what people think. You don't ever get to see exactly when they're feeling impacted by it. That happens alone in their homes when they're watching it, and you don't know what's really going on there, you hope it's helping them. But you often don't know. 

The most amazing thing with a series like this is that you get to actually see people say those things. What we're always hoping for is happening: people see it and feel relieved to see it. To feel like they either heard something that was said in a way they haven't been able to, or makes them feel inspired to tell their story, or inspires them to have a conversation that they haven't been able to have.

The writing process behind the series sounds fascinating. Can you tell me more?

Mark: For me, when Amanda and the team and I were finalizing the scripts, I could absolutely relate to Dante’s story. Because my father was in the military, and I wanted to be an artist. He had a certain idea of who I should be and the direction I should go in. I did not want to go in that direction. So a lot of these conversations are literally drawn from my past, from personal conversations. That's why when we were writing it with Amanda, the interactions, whatever Dante says and the response from his father, Bruce, have to have to sound true. Because I've had these conversations, I know how they sound, and I know how they end. So we were focusing on that a lot. For me, the Dante story was very personal in that respect. 

Amanda: Going along with that, Dante’s experience really resonated with quite a few people on our team during the process of building his story. Whether it was the team of artists, somebody on our art team, our CEO, or Mark — it resonates. Our writer for that arc as well, Jordan, felt he just really knew these conversations, and was very attached to them.

We've all found, in each of the story arcs, that there are moments that really hit you. And you think, “I've definitely felt like that.” Throughout all of them, that major thread of not wanting to burden people around you with what you're going through is such an incredibly relatable feeling. Feeling like your story, or whatever you're going through, is too much for people. That’s a big universal thread through all the stories that I hope will be relatable.

We also wanted to get the people that we're representing in these first five story arcs right. Because we know that there are as many stories as there are people, so these are not representative of everyone's story. But we wanted to make sure that we are addressing specific groups that are at higher risk for suicide.

Chico: I connect more with the character in the third act: Kyle. I used to play soccer and I suffered bullying when I was a kid. Actually, compared to Dante’s arc, my parents were always super supportive of my career as an artist. But one thing that I really like about the development of Bruce, is that his father is really real.

He's not the stereotype of the bad father. We had to make some changes in the last episode. We had to bring some sweetness during the scenes. Even though he is very strong, he can be very rude and very intense. We brought some sweetness every time that we could, to make sure that when he transforms in the last episode, it feels real. It was really touching, the way we would deal with scripts throughout the storyboard and the animation. There were times Mark would say, “he can't be that rude,” and we would tweak the storyboard.

Amanda: We didn't want to make him seem like a caricature of a person. We wanted to make sure that, even in the design, and the way that the animation is translated, makes sure that he looks like someone who has his particular point of view. He has whatever has been going on in his life that is making it impossible for him to connect with his son at that moment, but it doesn't mean that he doesn't want to in some way. We were concerned with Dante's story because we didn't want to get to the fourth episode and have him make a lightbulb switch. Like, “I'm fine now. Everything's fine. I'm suddenly totally getting it.”

We wanted to show hints of him wanting to be able to connect, but feeling this block, feeling this wall, and not being able to break it down. And feeling isolated.

Chico: Yes. And to understand what’s going on with his son. It was very successful in this way. But personally I relate more with Kyle. 

Amanda: Kyle's arc deals a lot with the presence of social media in his life. Specifically, tied to what other people think of him. He’s feeling very paranoid that everyone is always watching him and always criticizing him and feeling like he's not as cool or confident as his father. Feeling like he just can't quite connect to people because he's always bogged down with feeling this distrust of the people around him, and that’s only amplified by social media.

So we see him going through bullying. We see him going through what he's been dealing with on his own, with his own mental health, and what he thinks of himself. Something he says specifically in his story: “it's not just the comments calling me trash, it's that I believe it.” They're all just reinforcing what he already believed about himself. That was, I think, a really relatable thing to feel: It's not like these are new things; they're validating the worst things that I think about myself, and so they must be true.

Chico: Production-wise, it was a huge learning curve, working with Mark and Wonder Media on this, because my background is more working with comedy. We got this really emotional script we have to work with. It was a challenge that I really enjoyed jumping into, because of that emotional charge. Throughout the production, in the first eight episodes, I was learning what Amanda and especially Mark wanted as the storytelling. I believe that, by the third arc, I already understood what we should do. So doing those storyboards and the animation was more enjoyable for me. That's why I really connect and relate with Kyle's arc, too. That's another side of the story that I'd like to put in.

Amanda: That's funny because before the pitch even happened we had those initial character designs. We were working with one writer at first just to build the foundation of a series bible to start fleshing out who these characters are. What are we seeing in suicide statistics, that would lend itself to who these first stories should be about, and doing a lot of initial brainstorming work there before the pitch. Then taking those ideas, putting them into a pitch and creating them and saying “we don't have to do it exactly like this, but these are the types of stories that we could do.”

When we took it to the Cook Center, they really loved the initial ideas. Once we had them on board, and they decided they wanted to do this with us, that's when we really got into the weeds with the details of the stories. Making sure that they really do feel tied to what the experts are saying is needed, or the types of stories they've heard, or that they've had experiences with. 

We built a team of Jordan Gibler, myself and four other writers, so that we have a separate writer for each arc. We could have them working at the same time and also lend their own unique voice to premises that the characters had already. They were able to really expand upon them and bring their own experiences in as well, and it made them that much richer. So once we were able to get all of that script work done with them, for the first couple arcs we did an entire round with Mark where we were buckling in on the dialogue.

Then we would move it out to the clients and get their thoughts on it. Even though there was a lot of script work happening at the same time with this relatively small team, really mining these stories, and really getting them to a place that felt real. It was like we were just walking in on a conversation that was really happening. Once it got to the client, there wasn't a lot of back and forth. They've been wonderful people to work with, the Cook Center. I really enjoyed the entire writing process.

Mark: It’s not that we were hiding ourselves in these stories, but more that we’re collaborating and adding a layer of honesty and of personal experience to the script. Everyone had something to add that was honest and important.

Amanda: I will say we were very lucky. I think we've been lucky this entire time to have people who all have the same goal. Most of the time, people weren't being a stickler on something just because they like a particular way something is being said or if it makes the most sense to them. Everyone has been really open to collaboration and hearing other people out. Assessing whether we should say things that way because it doesn't feel good or maybe a teenager would hate hearing it, or something like that.

That was the other thing, making sure that not only were we handling these difficult themes safely, but also making sure that we were connecting to a teenage audience. And that we weren't pandering to them. Anytime we do something teen-related that's a big pet peeve. It’s a very grating thing when you hear something pander to a youth audience. They sense that lack of authenticity right away. There was a lot of reminding each other that these are all human beings.

When you consulted with experts, was this to ensure the scenarios were realistic?

Amanda: Yeah. Most importantly, we were making sure that the way we were talking about suicide and mental health wasn't super triggering, or inspiring contagion, or showing suicide methodology. Because it's really a sensitive thing. When you need to talk about suicidal ideation, you need to express visually how it feels to some people, what suicidal thoughts can feel like.

It’s a really tricky balance to be like: “okay, I need to show this without showing all of it.” Are we not really conveying the severity of what's going on here or have we gone a little too far? Are we now doing something that would inspire more suicidal behavior or thoughts in someone?

We don't want to do that. That's the opposite of what we want to do. So that was something we were always checking in on, with the clinicians on the teams; trying to make sure that it never felt that way. Or it always felt emotionally grounded and important. Or the weight was there, but in a way that wasn't dangerous.

Mark: In episode two, when Dante punches the mirror, for instance, and shatters the glass. There is a shot in that sequence where he looks at the shards of glass in the sink. It was really dramatic and really powerful. But immediately we went: “Are we giving someone an idea? Are we triggering something? Are we suggesting something?” So we removed it completely. That's kind of an illustration of telling these very dramatic stories, very carefully.

Amanda: Yeah, and that was the thing with the scripts. I think the script may have said something as simple as, “he considers the shard.” Which could be vague, but also not, depending on who's reading it. I think the client looked at that and said: “that’s a red flag.”

We want it to come across that he's in an emotionally volatile place, and he is dealing with these feelings in a way that's more intense than he's ever felt before. You get that punching a mirror in the locker room is not normal. It's not the sign of someone who was doing okay. It's a sign of someone who cannot express themselves and is just at a boiling point — and that's all you need to know.

What techniques did you use to affect the mood throughout the scenarios?

Chico: We were really leaning on acting from the characters to provide emotion. Mark was really important at this stage, because he did really great directing. At first, when I was talking to Jonas at the beginning and to the team, I thought that there would be even less motion than we have in the episodes. But it really struck us that we need more motion than we had. Mark gave us the right points and the words that we need to work on to convey emotion. 

This style, the designs of the characters, are more realistic than you would usually do in cartoons. So it's really easy to lose the model during a scene once the character moves his face or his head right, left or something like that. Having envelope deformers and the drawings inside Harmony helps us when, even if the animator misses the model in a scene, we can give the scene to a very skilled animator, and they can bring it back to the model without a big retake.

With such a focus on the closeup character’s emotions, it seems like this was very important to get right?

Chico: Yeah, we had to focus on that. We started thinking about that right from the start, in the storyboards and animatics. As I said before it took us maybe like five six episodes to understand what we needed emotionally to tell the story. We did it right from the start, from the first episode, but it got us back and forth working on those boards. The last episodes that we delivered to Mark and Amanda, we had really few notes on them. It really seemed to me that we understood what needed to be done.

Jonas: From a technical perspective, where Toon Boom Harmony really helps, is that since we need to achieve subtlety, like Zullo mentioned, we can use the deformers and controllers to make slight changes when necessary. Because the characters, even though they are stylized, they have to have a natural, realistic performance in the acting. In that sense, the builds we do... they're not very complex. But they offer enough to convey a performance that matches what the scene needs to tell.

What’s the process of capturing the voice actor’s expressions in the animated character?

Mark: A lot of the time, like in feature films, they put a lip-sync cam in the voice booth. It’s super useful to animators to see the voice actors actually perform the words. A lot of the time, it's a luxury that productions cannot afford, because you're recording several takes and then you're only picking one take. So it has to be the one take where you used the right lip-sync cam footage. And it becomes a bit of a logistical nightmare.

I's a luxury that a lot of productions can't afford and certainly we could not afford that. So I had to bring in what I saw, or what I see through my ears, and communicate that to Zullo and his team. And that is how it's done.

Amanda: Something important to say about the voice acting and recording process was that we're still in a pandemic. When we were doing voice recording for this, we were deeply in a pandemic. The entire production has been done remotely, and specifically this was something that I hadn't done at this scale remotely before. We did all of these voice sessions completely with, I think, nearly all the actors recording from their own studios.

We worked with Verité, which is a studio based here in L.A., who Split and Jonas have worked with before as well, to cast the show and to set up the voice sessions. Voice direction came from Rene and our buddy Nico, at Verité. But all of this was being done essentially over Zoom. And so everyone was in their own separate environment recording, and it was really wild what we were able to do. 

We never had two actors or more in the same room at the same time. Everybody recorded on their own, by themselves, and so that was a major part of making sure that it was emotionally sound afterward. Sometimes you would hear the radio play and think: “Wow, like, this is already very close.” And sometimes you'd think, “these two characters don't sound like they're in the same conversation.” Because they weren't having the same conversation.

As much as we tried to channel what we had experienced in the previous session, it was sometimes just a very different style. So we would have to go into those other voice files and make sure that the emotion of the scene was not lost and we were able to give Split something that really felt was an accurate representation of these scenes. But it was wild how many sessions there were and sometimes how long there they were. They were all done remotely. It was a really special and bizarre experience, all at one time. 

Amanda: Luckily we also had Zullo spending a lot of time in the sessions as well. The three of us were in nearly all of those sessions together so that Zullo could have that initial representation of what these voices would be, and feel informed in that way. Many times it was incredibly late for him to be in those sessions, being five hours ahead of us.

I remember one session, for Kyle’s arc specifically, was over four hours. It was nighttime in L.A., and it was already deep into night-time for New York, which is where that actor was living. Then Zullo was five hours ahead of us. It was so bizarre, but it was great.

Mark: And it was a Friday!

Chico: By the end, the biggest challenge that we had was to match the emotion in the voice recordings. That’s something that I always said to the team: “This acting is too good for us to ruin. Let’s make it right!”

Every time that we sat with Mark, it was a great opportunity to bring all that emotion to the scene. So it’s been amazing to work with this team, with such quality and a great effort from everyone.

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• All episodes of My Life Is Worth Living can now be watched on YouTube.
• Discover more meaningful work from Wonder Media on their website.
• Read more stories from our animation community on Toon Boom’s blog.