Trunk brings Anna Kovecses beautiful illustrations to life for Rightmove
Skwigly
Animation and Illustration are friends. Well, they’re more than friends actually, they’re family. I guess put simply, Illustration is the exhausted, 3am feeding, bottom wiping, smiling, loving, doting parent to Animation. Without which we’d have no characters to animate, no designs to work from, and no inspired sketches on the back of vape packets! Let’s not be pedantic, you can obviously animate in many forms, not all requiring illustration, but I think we can agree it plays a big part!
Over the years Trunk have worked with some amazing illustrators, including the likes of Pete Fowler, Rob Ryan, Peepshow Collective, Oliver East, and recently Mila Furstova. Whose album cover for Coldplay’s Ghost Stories LP was turned into a stunning 43 minute film by Trunk’s directors Alasdair + Jock. That’s on top of the Trunk directors illustrating themselves, it’s never enough to ‘just’ be a director these days. Animation directors come equipped with at least one special power, so they’ll generally direct and excel at either illustrating, animating or compositing!
So when London based agency Homebrew called Trunk’s studio to ask if they could animate Anna Kovecses’s beautiful illustrations, the answer was a resounding yes! Both producer Richard Barnett, and director Layla Atkinson were already big fans of her work, and Layla had already stocked the studio’s library with Anna’s book ‘One Thousand Things’.
The project was for Homebrew’s client, Rightmove, the UK’s largest property portal, Homebrew were commissioned to create a multi platform campaign to promote their onsite School Checker tool. This was to include a 30 sec TV spot, a 10 sec cut down and a dedicated 30 sec spot for mobile. Rightmove’s School Checker gives you access to admissions criteria and academic inspection reports for primary and secondary schools across Great Britain. Now on every property, School Checker lets you discover previous admission areas and Ofsted ratings to easily compare schools.
The agency wanted a warm and charming style, full of colour and fun, and Anna, repped at Handsome Frank, was the perfect match. As Anna had never worked with animators before Trunk decided to meet with her to discuss the animation process. As her studio was based in Cyprus, (Oh no!) The guys were forced to leave a chilly London for sunny Larnaca in early February! Following the successful meeting a team of animators headed by Layla was pulled together in London to create the three shorts.
Layla notes, “Animating Anna’s work was a treat and it was a real joy to see her bold and colourful illustrations come to life. This job also enabled us to solve a problem that is becoming increasingly hard to resolve. Recently we have been producing a lot of work where a digital screen containing the product has to be seen. Other than an over the shoulder shot or a cut to, it is hard to come up with a fresh way of showing them. However, as this campaign features children we were able to use their natural capacity to place themselves in unusual positions such as upside down or draped over furniture while using a device. This enabled us to have the screen face the viewer in a very natural and charming way. It also added a lot of fun to the script and matched the tone of Anna’s illustrations.“