How and why did your journey into animation begin?
We were both studying cinema in 2015, we wanted to do animation. We knew some basic concepts of animation and we self-taught all the animation knowledge that we didn’t have. We begin practicing a lot with stop motion. At the same time, we worked as interns in some animation projects until 2017, then we decided to begin with our studio. We start working making video clips for bands, and eventually, we expand to other clients and projects and currently developing also personal projects.
What are your sources of inspiration?
The usual inspiration for projects comes from other visual artists, we regularly consume cinema, live-action, and animation, painters, illustrators, animators, even dancers. We are always searching for inspiration for everything around us, not only what we consume. Some things come from nowhere like, “look at the sunlight in that room or that person”, sometimes the inspiration came from playing like “look at the object, ¿it wouldn’t look funny if it moves like this?”, and sometimes from our kid. Spending time with children is a great way to make you think creatively and outside your mental structures. When we need more specific inspiration we go to the internet and our library usually when we already know what we are looking for and to have alternatives to improve what is in our imagination. We search for past projects or ideas, we search for other artists as we mentioned before.
Music is also a big inspiration, but for more personal projects the music has more power to inspire.
Tell us about your creative process.
We draw a lot, We draw to make a storyboard and the character designs but drawing is always a tool. To communicate with each other, to draw a quick animation on a board or the light, even the narration structure is built by many little drawings. We jump from the pc to a mood board where we hang ideas, to the storyboard hung on another wall into the work table full of drawings in papers to the chalkboard with more drawings to the pc again. Our studio is full of places to draw with every kind of media and to materialize ideas and discuss with each other. We have a daughter and when we aren’t working we are drawing a lot just for fun and those fun moments sometimes jump into the workplace and inspire our process.
We tend to focus more on the narrative side of the projects we like to build the story, on how we can explore and tell a story with the montage, the camera, the pose of the characters, the light, colors and the narratives elements, like the metaphors or allegories we could create, so at the end of the day some of the videos we made don’t focus too much into much in the animation or super fancy fluid animation, we prefer to have a still image with an emotive light and color that can embrace what we want to tell. Because we’re a studio of two we can’t always develop every single area of the production and we feel more drawn to the other narration elements than the animation itself. For the style, we love to mix elements and we tend to embrace what every technique can bring us to the story. We like the texture that brings the stop motion but we also like to combine that with digital art and 2D animation. We usually make the characters for stop motion and the backgrounds are a blend of digital and crafted backgrounds.
We always like to have some room for experimentation, even with a well-defined script, even after the animation, after the editing and after the final export, our mind is working thinking in other approaches or ways to tell the story, that why even if we try to define everything in the storyboard/animatic we always leave some room to make changes, sometimes in the animation we see another better way to show the action or in montage we discover another order for the clips that help us.
Is there a part of the process that bores you? And instead which part is the one that excites you?
Every project, in the beginning, is exciting, partially because everything can happen, late in the process, the excitement transforms itself not in the possibilities but into wanting to materialize what we have built so far. It’s different in each project and all have different needs and requirements. Some projects make us fall in love with creating the characters, others in finding the right story, and another in letting us play with the animation.
Some projects need a lot of planning and taking too much time planning can be a little exhausting or some projects require a lot of editing, chroma key, and masking and that can be defined as boring as well, so it’s different with each one. If we think of a boring task maybe could be if we need to do a very long or repetitive task, like finishing parts, in the script, the animation or the editing sometimes require more time than anticipated and that could become a little off, that moment when everything is working right you just need to touch on some minor details.
We struggle a little with the idea of boredom because we recently have to redefine that word. Last year we learned that Silvina has ADHD, and with that, we have to deconstruct a lot of ideas of how we normally think and manage work and more specifically working with animation. To build a new way of work differently. We know now (and every day learn something new) some of the challenges that may come with ADHD and we are currently in the process to make a neurodiverse-friendly studio that can contemplate the necessity of other ways to work. How to light, sonorize, manage time work and breaks, how to incorporate breaks.
It’s still a process but we don’t usually think of a task as boring instead, how can we incorporate it into the process and that doesn’t break the workflow. Also, all the ways we come across to deal with ADHD, in the end, result in a more relaxed space and a more creative one.
How would you define the animation scene not linked to big brands? Is there an audience? What channels do you use to post and reach as many viewers as possible?
The animation scene is very big and diverse, you have the very mainstream and global products, but under that is a lot of material for every person with much diversity in the wide meaning of the work, form the narration, the style, the audience, everything and yet there is much more to explore. Festivals are a great place to see this diversity and not only the big ones.
Nowadays there is a niche for almost everything, principally on the internet. Even Big brands in some cases are trying to do less “All the public” work and begin to build animation for a niche. We think thank niche and segmented audiences are going to be more explored and common in the future
Social media is a great place to promote your work, personal things, and professional work. On the internet people engage more and like to see your process, you can engage and participate more directly, for us it helps us to reach more people, clients, fellow animators, and other studios.
For the exhibition of personal pieces, festivals are a great place to show your work, meet people, make collaborations and find an audience. Before the pandemic, we frequented the animation film festivals of Argentina, and now things are getting calmer we are excited to come back.
Now the virtual and physical world is more connected and what you do in one has
New projects in the pipeline?
In our professional work, we are currently working on a couple of video clips. In our personal projects, we are always thinking or preparing new ideas. Our most immediate project is a stop motion short called “Días de espiritus” (Spirit’s day). and we are hoping to begin with the festivals and distribution process for the second part of the year. After this, we have one short of magic realism with only one character and a house,… but it will have to wait to see light.
