Gelattina

There is one rarity among our projects if we think about it deeply: the Hand-Made video. Few productions require such effort in both its physical component than its digital aspect, and a lot of work goes into giving soul and personality to the little paper people and props that appear in these videos.

But don’t be deceived into thinking that it only requires drawings (upon drawings!) to be made, and voice over’s to do.

Prior to the actual “hand-made” phase, a script that is clear and pleasant must be made, as well as a storyboard that details the whole video, much in the vein of an ad or short movie preproduction practices. After that Ana, our resident “hand-made” expert, begins to draw a huge amount of content to be used on the video.

Whenever a production reaches the end of the actual “hand-made” phase, Ana has to deal with the coloring, cutting and arrangement of the elements to be used in the video. She does so many variants and drawings, that some of us even helped once ( I even actually got a rather pleasant déjà-vu from the 5^th Grade art class!) since the amount of work to be done was absolutely  humungous.

Even though my previous comment may belittle the process, and make it sound easy and carefree, this is quite deceiving, as the work needed to finish the HMV requires arduous work, and sometimes even more effort than the earlier phases.

The timing, music and voice over need to be perfectly planned and executed for the whole video to flow as intended. Any spastic movements should be intentional to give it more charm, as unintentional flaws in the animation process just look plain awkward most of the time. Each pose has to be shot individually, much like stop motion animation.

After walking you through the whole process, we have to thank the biggest inspiration behind our “Hand-made videos”: the masters @ Common Craft. Their fun, innovative videos gave us food for thought and this lead us to the creation of this product. Personally I couldn’t disagree more with their name, their craft is everything BUT common.

We’ve already made a wealth of video with this method, and each process has been hard, but rewarding and enjoyable for all of us. We hope you guys feel the same about them, and that we’ve been able to honor our inspiration.

You can watch our work here.

Over/Out!