Unexpected Collaborations

We recently completed a motion project for the University of Sydney's new Charles Perkins Centre. The campaign, "Unexpected Collaborations" was developed by Sydney agency The Monkeys who approached In the Thicket to pitch on a series of videos to launch the new research centre.

Working with co-director Mel Pragassen, we pitched a series of videos that would be a hybrid of stop motion and live action. The treatment we pitched back to The Monkeys made use of unexpected materials and objects such as bouncing ice-creams, fruit molecules, buttons and mechanised plants to visualise the innovative and progressive nature of the centre which brings together experts from wide ranging fields.

We were stoked to win the pitch and the following three videos are the product of 3 long weeks of pre-production, testing , a 3 day shoot and post. The three stories told are Universal Similarities (biologists working with astrophysicists dir. Mel Pragassen), Sweetfighter (diabetes experts working with gaming programmers dir. Maricor/Maricar) and Robocrop (farmers working with robotics experts dir. Maricor/Maricar).

We also worked on the design and build of the props for the two videos. Unlike our previous stop motion animations for this project we worked with mostly 'real' items such as fresh fruit and flowers which was a new challenge but thoroughly enjoyable. In the next few posts we'll share some of the process we went through making the props and how the videos were developed.