As part of the motion go club we decided to go to the Motion North, a collective of animation, vfx, motion and film designers event. The night we went, the focus was on three different animation and motion lead companies and what they had been working on over the past year.
Each company had a show reel of work and sneak peeks of other projects they are working on and I wanted to talk a little about what I found particularly interesting about each of them.
Ani-made
https://animade.tv/studio
Ani-made is a London based company. They showcased a lot of interactive project they worked on such as 'Ready Stead Bang' a minimal monotone cowboy game comprised of fast paced mini games. A lot of their animations are quirky and show the backgrounds of their staff in traditional 2D cel animation and character design.I loved their diversity in their styles and media.
The Complete Animade Lernz from Animade on Vimeo.
Mainframe North
https://www.mainframe.co.uk
Mainframe is an animation company based in Manchester and London focusing on motion graphics and animation. They showed us some of the more fun projects they have been working on including this video below:
The unexpected nature of this video is what makes it so interesting to watch and its creativity created a big following on social media. The use of 3D with soft pastel colours and clever sound effects made this video a visual treat.
They talked about a project called 'MASH' a developed dynamics modes system for the 3D software Maya that creates more realistic and impressive physics effects to objects in fake 3D enviroments. As someone relatively familiar with how difficult it can be to fake physics in similar software, I found it very impressive.
Boutique Studio
http://btq.fi/work/
Helsinki based studio, this team showed a great understanding of how to present 'serious' content in a fun and silly way. Describing themselves as an illustration team disguised as a design agency their success allowed their market to become worldwide.
Ruutu TV Channel Idents from Boutique on Vimeo.
The project I liked the most was one where they had to create a brand for a Tv Channel/vod called Ruutu. They had control over full branding for the channel and integrated 3D with audio algorithms to create unique patterns in a variety of styles keeping an open and consistent style through the colour scheme.
Conclusion
After listening to these talks I felt inspired to be more playful with my own work, a recent fear of mine was that I wasn't being too 'serious' with my project ideas, so it was incredibly refreshing to hear these creative companies doing what they want to do and then getting work from doing it.
I want to implement more puns and colour into the things I create, or surprising twists and left the event with a strong urge to work harder with 3D software.
In my own time I played around with 3D software and created donuts with a physics effect to give the impression of them falling. While visually it is relatively simple, it was a great learning process for me and I left with a stronger knowledge of the software. I am also going to put in a video of one of my failed attempts below cause I found it personally amusing: donut gone wrong
