Smart Made Simple for Weight Watchers

Late last year we worked with our amazing producers at In the Thicket to craft 8 spots for Weight Watchers and their creative team at BMF.

For the campaign we combined a mixture of stop motion and live action using a very stylised and graphic approach to the props and styling. A few of the spots are now live with the rest rolling out through the year.

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.

Summer/Autumn and "Back to the Start"

There's now a chill in the air and the blazing sunsets we've come to expect have faded away to ones
that are grey, white and pale. Brrrr, luckily we're going to skip the northern winter and will be home in time for summer in Sydney. We realised we have less than 3 months though before we head back so we're cramming in all the things we kept putting off: galleries, museums, cafes and curiosities. We jotted them all down and each week we have a lucky dip. Our fist pick was the flower markets at Columbia Road where we enjoyed a leisurely Sunday of people watching and flower hawking and came away with a chili plant and some thyme. But not as successful, was our trip to the Natural History Museum. We got diverted by heavy rain and a sea of children to the bedlam that is Harrods on a wet weekend in London. Some things I learnt that day – avoid museums during the summer holidays especially on a weekend, Harrods is crazy and somewhere I need not visit again and I'm very picky about my almond croissants. Since then we've had trips to St Bride's Printing Library, Victoria Park, Brick Lane Sunday Markets, Rough Trade and No Brow which have all been a lot more exciting.

Below are some of the goodies we picked up from the No Brow store. Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson, Flesh and Bones: A Colouring Concertina by John Sibbick and Rise & Fall by Micah Lidberg. A place you must visit if you're in London, No Brow are independent publishers that work with graphic artists and illustrators to produce exquisitely tactile printed works. They have a show coming up in September that looks like it will be pretty awesome. Masks is an exhibition of works from Ben Newman and it opens on the 15th of September.

And lastly here are some stop motion animations that have blown our minds lately. Johnny Kelly from Nexus Productions beautifully crafted stop motion animation "Back to the Start" has just gone live. There's a behind the scenes here and some production stills from the shoot.

And a classic animation that we were introduced to at LIAF, "Hedgehog in the Fog". Stunning, mesmerising and so technically brilliant.

London Calling

So long Sydney, we're sad to say goodbye but hello London!

We arrived early Tuesday morning at around 5.30 and after 24 hours flying thank goodness we opted for a cab transfer from the airport. I doubt we'd have made it to our friends' place otherwise. The flights themselves were pretty good but any extended period of time suspended in halfway time between your old timezone and your new one is always disorienting and exhausting. On the second leg from Hong Kong to London we somehow managed to score first row seats which meant we had extra leg room. I felt a bit guilty though. Since we're small asian girls we were in the least need, especially as there seemed to be a whole fleet of giant rugby fans/players crammed in nearby.

Our first week has been a mix of work and exploring.. sadly more of the former. We sorta nerded out and made sure we hunted down an art supply store, fabrics and craft store and grocery shops nearby. No denying where our priorities lie :)

On Saturday we checked out a couple of Markets around east London. I scored a rope necklace at the new Designers Markers Market and we ogled the beautiful food (and people) at Broadway Market. We're hoping to find a rental nearby since the markets are so amazing. I miss living in Newtown and it feels somewhat similar, a cross between Newtown and Surry Hills.

This week we have a commission to finish that's been keeping us from exploring more. I shouldn't complain about being busy but it's a bummer we're stuck indoors. Oh well we'll just have to sew like crazy :)

Maricor and I have also put up a massive update on our site. The full series of embroideries from our Turns of Speech & Figures of Phrase exhibition is up as well as the latest Global Village artworks and an illustration we made for Anorak Magazine's Food is Fun series. We are also proud to share our latest animation that we created for British Council Australia. Together with Republic of Everyone we created an animation to help launch Big Green Idea, a great funding initiative by the British Council. We worked on it before we flew out and had to multitask more than usual for this project. Making the props, rigging, lighting, camera ops and post production. It was a bit of a stretch at times! Although it was a busy two week we had a great time working on it, coming up with the cute paper characters and learning new techniques.

Non-stop stop motion

We're very excited about the latest project we've been busy working on which will go live very soon, in the meantime here's a sneak peak. A paper based stop motion animation...in two weeks. No tag teaming on this one, all hands on deck!

Bingle Car Insurance

The paper project we mentioned a few weeks ago has gone live so we can finally share more details about the job - a series of stop motion Bingle car insurance tvcs created by Scott Pickett from the Jungle Boys. Co and I created the 2d paper elements working with the super talented Benja Harney who created the 3d paper sculptures. My favourites are Benja's car, co's driver and customer rep scene and the Sales Department building. It was heaps of fun coming up with the different characters. The most nerve wracking part was drawing on top of Benja's lovely creations, we didn't want to screw them up!

Here's one of the five animations, and some production shots from the shoot.

'Blerg' IdN magazine 100th issue + Australian Edge interview

The stop motion animation we directed with Michael Blanche is finally finished! We didn't want to jinx it in case it wasn't finished in time for the deadline but now we can say what it's for. We'll post the final animation when the issue comes out.

Also co and I have an interview up at AustralianEdge. Thanks Clayton and Duncan!

A new animation

We've got a new animation in the works, it's a stop motion one with miniature sets. We're experimenting with a few techniques with lighting and lenses and we've done all the animation in camera. This piece is a joint collaboration with co-director Michael Blanche and our super talented friend Becky Freeman aka Sui Zhen is providing original music.

We're just putting the finishing touches on it so in the meantime here are some progress shots. The process has been interesting and to describe it as hectic would be a huge understatement! The turnaround for the whole project has been 2 and a half weeks but we're all chuffed with the results.

co/

Murder By Death "White Noise"

Here is the finished animation for Murder By Death's "White Noise", the band were awesome to work with! We had fun with some stop motion in this video but the majority of it was created in After Effects using hand drawn graphics, built props, bleached chicken bones and bits and pieces we scavenged from our garden and our clothes.

Murder By Death - "White Noise" from MaricorMaricar on Vimeo.

WIP - "White Noise" music video

We've almost finished our latest project, an animated music video for Murder by Death's track "White Noise". The band have been awesome to work with, they came up with the idea for the video and asked us if we would like to work with them after they saw our animation "Say Hello to the Ground".

These are some style frames for the animation and I've also posted some photos from the mini stop motion shoot we did. Thanks Michael for building us an amazing animation stand!

/ca

ABC Playschool - "If All the World Were Paper' animation

If All The World Were Paper from MaricorMaricar on Vimeo.

Paper animation we directed and animated for the ABC's Playschool while at Mathematics.