Moth is a London-based animation and illustration collective set up by three graduates of the Royal College of Art – David Prosser, Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits, and Daniel Chester. Each member is a powerful director in their own right, as evidenced by their award-winning graduating thesis films, but this commission by WWF shows off what happens when their powers combine like Voltron. I’m looking forward to more work from Moth and the many young guns coming out of London.
Some words from Moth about their process after the jump!
Well we knew from the first email that this was going to be a great project for us. The words ‘WWF’ (good cause) and ‘creative control’ were mentioned and that got us interested immediately!
The agency Aimaq Von Lobenstein, based in Berlin, gave us a basic script and after winning the pitch we started enriching the story, storyboarding and designing. This is really the important stage for us working as a collective. To make sure projects fully reflect us as a group we come together and make sure the direction and style of a piece is something we all completely agree on right from the very beginning. This way if one of us cant be part of the entire process it’s still ‘our’ work and we’ve all had an impact.
For the design we really aimed for a look that blended our individual styles together, and we then each concentrated on some aspects of it, backgrounds, characters etc. The essential thing is to make sure that all these elements work together harmoniously. What makes us a collective I guess is that we have a very similar way of translating stories. We hardly have to convince each other on an idea, there is a very harmonic relationship and communal approach, which makes it so pleasant to work together.
For this project due to its size, we had the opportunity to bring together all the people we really wanted to work with. Having such a fantastic team in the studio meant despite working hard, we also managed to have a very pleasant time too! Also working with Marian Mentrup was a blessing. Doing both the sound design and music composition meant he was able to keep a delicate balance between the two, and work with us closely throughout the process.
Fingers crossed we will get to do some similar projects in the future! And we hope that people will go along and sign the petition after watching this video, that’s how we will be able to judge its success.
Credits
Directed by Moth Collective
Client: WWF
Agency: Aimaq Von Lobenstein
Music and Sound Design: Marian Mentrup
Animation: Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits, Daniel Chester, David Prosser, Matthias Hoegg, Mikey Please, James Hatley, Kristian Andrews, Daniela Negrin Ochoa, Matthew Frost, Ifor Ashton
Compositing: Daniel Chester, Matthias Hoegg, Mikey Please