Pangolin

Making Graphs A Bit Nicer

When the lovely people at Pangolin Pharmatech approached us to create an engaging video, we were excited. You might ask, why on earth would we get excited at the prospect of creating an informative animation for a pharmaceutical analytics company? That would be not only a mouthful, but also a perfectly understandable train of thought. Well, one reason for the aforementioned excitement was the brief. We were challenged to deliver an illustrated character to give a more endearing quality to what is otherwise a very data heavy topic. This sort of thing really tickles us - giving us a license to make the boring, not so boring - and even fun from time to time. Another reason was the company's general approach of what they wanted to achieve visually, including to use their brand's refined colour scheme for the animation, with a vision to project a clean, modern vibe. All in all, a refreshing project, with a mindset that seemed in line with our own. Hurray!

We started as usual by planning the visual style. Restricting wild deviations from the Pangolin brand colour palette allowed for a more focused design method, better utilising basic form and placement in the illustrative style. See:

During these initial designs we played around with the idea of using mechanical items and machinery to represent the less than engaging spreadsheet process, but this was scrapped in case it could influence the perception of the company. No one wanted the possibility of the message communicated being seen as anything other than that of a pharmatech brand. We stuck to relatable iconography that was visually stimulating, but remained true to the content...

... and we created lots of icons.

We took spreadsheets, and we made an animation about them which made them look awesome. We're thrilled with the final product, it's clean, striking, and most importantly it successfully manages to clearly communicate quite a complex message. 

Check out the moving parts below at the Pangolin website, here!

Sixt - Drink Driving Campaign

Creating a Memorable Video to Prevent Drink Driving

Shortly before Christmas, we were asked by the creative marketing agency, Every1 to work with them on creating an animated drink driving campaign for the multinational car rental company, Sixt. 

Months later, and after numerous tweaks, the project has finally reached completion. 

The writers at Every1 had conceptualised a story that used word play on popular cocktail names, which we thought was a very clever way to appeal to a cocktail culture that might be tempted to drink and drive. Building upon this concept, we proposed a visually stylistic presentation of the story, through silhouetted images contained within the various cocktail glasses. Getting the green light on this idea, we set to work designing a striking visual approach to complement the impacting narrative content.

We employed clean cut lines to reflect the general tone of cocktail menu design, and a vibrant colour palette to match the luscious gradients and hues of popular drinks.

In animation, after considerable experimentation to create subtle bubble effects, we found that a combination of motion tweened layers of digital brush speckles with a couple of simple particle effects worked best. For one or two relevant drinks that have more of a pronounced fizz, we additionaly filmed a glass filling up with cola and overlayed it within the particle layers.

To create the grunge look of later shots, we photographed various weathered surfaces, painted decor, and scuffed glass. We multiplied these images with digitised brushstrokes on top of our silhouetted designs, allowing for a level of gritty realism which contrasted nicely with the clean cocktail design style.

Does none of this make sense? Well, just take a look at the final video below, it might become clearer. Let us know what you think, we're pretty chuffed with it. A word of caution, it's much darker than our usual fare! 

To find out more, and get all of the facts, visit www.sixt.co.uk/drink-drive-awareness

Merry Christmas 2013!

It's our last day before breaking up for a magical Christmas! To celebrate, here are some Christmas cards from us here at Chog Zoo Animation, to spread a little festive cheer.

Print them out and put them on your fireplace! We hope you have a brilliant Christmas, full of loads of food and spending time with your favourite people in the world. See you in the new year!

Sound Recording Shenanigans

Recording Audio for Ten Town at Brock n Broll Recording Studio

On Wednesday (the 13th November) the talented Michael Whalley welcomed Chog Zoo to his fantastic recording studio in Chorley to record song vocals, narration and character voices for Ten Town.

Brock n Broll is a cosy little studio crammed full of state of the art equipment and charm, and Michael (as seen sporting snazzy headphones in the photo above) was a genial host; not to mention a man with the patience of... well, someone who is VERY patient. We laid down vocals for over twenty song variants, twelve episode narrations, many character voice tracks and some very dodgy French accents for a new character called Thierry. 

Instrumental to the day was the incredible and beautiful actress Josie Cerise (pictured above) who you might recognise from playing Mini Ha Ha in the twice BAFTA nominated TV show Ha Ha Hairies, and playing Mouse in the West End production of The Gruffalo. We were honoured to witness her in action, providing the voice of Ten Town chef Tia Ten, and also lending her stunning singing voice to a song which will feature at the end of new episodes. Her takes were amazing and bring a new level of excellence to the world of Ten Town. Look out for Josie, because she's doing big things! You can catch her performing at the Roundhouse in London this December, where she stars in My Brother The Robot. Find out more here!

Thanks to Michael and Josie for a day of truly inspiring work. Not only was Wednesday remarkably productive due to the hard work put in by everyone, but it was a lot of fun. Hurray for talented people!

Ten Town Wins Award!

A Victory For Chog Zoo Education!

It was recently announced that Ten Town, the number learning resource for which Chog Zoo provided design, branding, more than 20 animations, voice acting and all sorts of miscellaneous creativity has won a prestigious award! Isn't it nice to be recognised from time to time? 

The awards were the Practical Pre-School Awards, where Ten Town scooped not only a gold award, but the Overall Winner accolade for the whole Music and Multimedia category. Hurray for Ten Town!

Chog Zoo is currently working on a fresh commission to expand the Ten Town universe, with an aim to assist children learning to count and write numbers up to 20. We're thrilled to be a part of this fantastic educational resource, take a look at www.tentown.co.uk for more information!

Face Up Fred

Stockport Council Cancer Awareness Brief

When we heard that Stockport Council needed an animated video to promote cancer awareness, we felt that Chog Zoo could deliver something really special, and so we decided to pitch for the opportunity. At a "Dragon's Den" style evening, we faced a board of dragons, assembled from the council and spearheaded by members from the Stockport Central Area Youth Forum. We proposed to work with the young people to develop characters and stories, passing on skills in animation and music production, with an intention to produce an animated educational product contained in both a website, and a tangible interactive display stand with banners and flyers. 

Our pitch was probably something magical, or else the youth group just liked us, because Chog Zoo won the commission, and so began the development for our project to raise awareness of getting checked for cancer! Mountains of hours later, we had taken characters designed by youth forum members and smoothed them into a consistent Chog Zoo style and delivered an immersive educational package . 

Working away at Chog Zoo HQ alongside the youth workshop development sessions, we created a professional quality interactive animation, website, a fun and educational interactive display stand, and designed information banner stands along with four page leaflets. We developed a striking colourful yet clean brand image, to be consistently used throughout the visual elements of the project.

The story, developed with the young people, follows Fred, who notices something wrong with his body but is afraid to get checked. The viewer is then led inside Fred's body to see how his organs are responding to the changes, and after seeing how he is pressured from family and friends, the viewer may decide whether Fred visits the doctor. Your choice will result in drastically different outcomes for Fred!

To see the animation, and choose how Fred face up to cancer, go to www.FaceUpFred.com

Universal

International Artists Repertoire Animation

Chog Zoo was approached by the lovely 99Giants studio in London to create storyboards, artwork and assets for a video to showcase the artists on the Universal record label roster, for their International Artist Repertoire.  We crafted a hand made cardboard "puppet theatre" feel in the visuals that we are very pleased with, with our assets then being animated by 99Giants in-house. 

This was the first time we designed an animation without then animating the movements ourselves, and while it was strange to "pass the baton" it was a great experience in focusing on one aspect of a project. So yeah, these are some of our visuals, we're pretty happy with the atmosphere we created. Hope you are too.