Propz – an Interview with Animade
By now most of you will have seen Animade‘s latest personal project Animade Propz, in which the team have taken it upon themselves to create between them short, bite-size animations all centered around a prop suggested by the public. This luck-of-the-draw method of working has brought the studio together to create a project showcasing their range of style and talent. Acting as a follow-on from their previous Lernz series where they took it upon themselves to produce short tutorials on the do’s and don’ts of basic animation, the short series of ten recently drew to a close, with a compilation piece that you can see below:
We took a little time with several of Animade’s contributors to talk about how and why they created this fantastic, collaborative piece:
Where did the initial idea for your animated Propz series come from?
Russ Etheridge (Senior Creative): The original concept for Propz came out of the desire to create some sort of loose follow-up to our previous series of shorts, Lernz. The animation team gathered and started throwing ideas around, eventually boiling them down to as simple a concept as possible – a single prop. Then the ‘proper recognition’ slang connection was realised…and as a general rule of thumb, if you can make a pun out of it, you’re on to a winner!
What was the main thing you set out to achieve with the mini-series?
Ed Barrett (Creative Director): Producing animation like this is a great way to let off steam. You can’t really plan that much in the allotted production time (two days), you just have to go for it and that’s pretty liberating for an animator. So it’s partly to do with having fun and enjoying the expression this format offers, but it’s also a way of keeping the studio interesting to the community and clients alike. The short, sharp episodic content means we can share new work more often.
Each week a different prop was picked from a hat, but how do you choose who does the animation each week?
Lana Simanenkova (Animator): It strongly depends on the jobs that we’re working on at the time. In the beginning we were tossing a coin to decide but as the year picked up pace we began choosing whichever team member was more or less between client jobs. While in production, we try to free up that animator’s schedule for the two-day Propz extravaganza and make sure they get the least amount of distraction.
After you’d draw the props on a Friday you’d then have the weekend to produce the micro-short based on the chosen prop. Did this ever proven difficult for the animator?
Ed: The prop is drawn on the Monday after the weekend’s submissions and the chosen team member has two days within the week to produce the animation. This can sometimes prove difficult if the animator is caught up on another project, but it’s usually just a matter of shuffling people around internally to make sure all bases are covered. Back when we animated Lernz we had far fewer people in the studio and the last few episodes were delayed as a result; something we didn’t want happening on this series.
It’s always great to see a studio create for the sake of creating, why do you think these smaller, more free projects are important to a studio like yours?
Russ: There’s a few reasons these projects are important to us. I think first and foremost it’s that we really love creating fun things as a team. It can be a real blast coming up with silly ideas and seeing how far we can take them. It also makes for great practice when it comes to our commercial work. It’s the self-driven pieces that get the most attention from other people and really get our name out there, ultimately bringing in the kind of fun client projects we love doing.
Why have you decided to stop at ten shorts for the series? Will there be more in the future?
Ed: Ten is a lovely round number and there’s five of us so everyone gets a couple of animations to make. It also mirrors Lernz in this way. As for the future, who knows! The quick episodic structure of these series seems to befit our studio and our working practices, so I have no doubt there’ll be more at some point.
You can watch the full series here and on Animade’s blog here. To learn more about the work of the studio visit animade.tv