MOTION DESIGN, MADE BY HAND

In the age of generative AI, CGI and a myriad of digital techniques, there is nothing that captures an audience’s attention quite like lovingly, hand-crafted stop motion. Viewers can feel the heart and soul of the artists, captured in every frame.

‍- Peter Nizic, Director

‍‍
“It’s like motion graphics without the computer!” is one comment by a viewer inspired by the dedication to this craft.

Cobram Estate is world renowned for their award winning Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Perhaps less well known is their commitment to environmental sustainability. The olive groves at Cobram Estate absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than it takes to produce their oils AND less than 0.5% of their outputs end up in landfill. Our challenge with this project was to come up with an interesting and engaging way to highlight this commitment.

So, what better way to feature this than to recycle organic material, directly from Cobram Estate’s olive groves.

Piecing this project together – leaf by leaf, pit by pit – was an incredibly intricate production for all involved and we’re absolutely delighted with the result.‍

- David Brown, Noisy Beast’s managing director and partner.‍

Considering the cyclical nature of the olive grove life cycle, we decided to keep all motion and transitions flowing in a clockwise rotation, just like every “Life Cycle Diagram” you’ve ever seen in a text book. Similarly, the idea was to continue the circular theme within each set piece to reinforce the concept.

The goal was to create scenes in a simple and effective way, by using organic material sourced directly from the groves of Cobram Estate, such as olives, leaves, branches, olive pits, mulch and soil. We even recreated the iconic Cobram Estate olive oil bottle out of organic material.

When we were first given the brief to create a stop motion film entirely out of organic material and waste, I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind that the whole thing would end up looking like one big, brown pile of dirt. Once the client sent us pictures of the materials, it allowed us to begin the process by creating Photoshop composites of each scene, as loose starting blocks to build on. This gave us an idea of the parameters we were working with and was the first time we were able to envision the colour palette available to us. From here, Art Department was able to develop the look, whilst we started to previz the motion in 2d.

One of the biggest challenges in using organic material in stop motion animation is the fact that, once picked, the leaves, in particular, have a shelf life before they start to wilt and decompose. Stop motion is a long and tedious process, so it was important for us to test how long we could use certain materials, before they would decay.

It became clear that even after one day, the leaves start to curl and change colour and the olives start to rot. This meant that we had to plan our shoot schedule accordingly, making sure we could get through certain scenes quickly. To ensure everything stayed fresh, Art Department could not premake many of the set pieces before we were ready to shoot, so the main set pieces were continually being made in the background, as we were animating.

The amount of planning that goes into a stop motion shoot is insane. You can’t just re-shoot a scene if the client doesn’t like something, so it is a lot of hand holding and problem solving in pre, to ensure everyone knows exactly what they’re getting! It’s essentially a full animation and production piece, in one. An additional challenge with this shoot was working with organic material of all different sizes/decomposing rates - it was half science experiment, half art piece! We had the absolute dream team working on this though, so there was not a frame in the entire piece that was not discussed at length and crafted to perfection. Super proud of the outcome!

- Haley Polacik, Pixel EP

All in all, the time spent in pre-production allowed us to iron out most issues, get the client on side and gave us a clear vision for the film. We spent, a relatively smooth, four and half days on set animating, with a further 2 weeks in post, tackling clean-up, compositing and finishing.

- Director of Photography, Simon Higgins said:

“The really interesting through line of working with Director/Animators and Director/Designers is that they typically have a very specific outcome in mind for the visuals. Sometimes these requests defy gravity or physics and as the cinematographer you’re oftentimes tasked with fitting a pictorial idea into the real world and its limitations. In this case, we were dealing with visual media that has a shelf life of just a few hours and we had to be super efficient with our execution of the stop motion. Fortunately we had a great art director on board, Jacqui Hudson, who along with Director Pete, had run all sorts of tests with the usable dry life of the plants. Jacqui hand built all sorts of miniature and full scale sculpted set pieces and would dress them with organic material immediately prior to the animation. The set pieces were also all of varying depths and I had to devise a descriptive lighting scenario that would create a subtle “on the farm” mood, yet also be generic enough to allow the animation to start at frame 1 and run continuously to frame 1200 without interruption.”

“During the shoot we discovered a nice flickering light effect as a happy accident, as the furnace grill door opened to the fire scene. Pete was able to extract a little fire flicker loop and enhance that.”

“The sheer tiny size of all these particles meant they were really vulnerable to any extraneous movement and environmental factors, often the enemy of stop motion shoots. As always, we were able to capitalise on Dragonframe’s features and we utilised their live view to export to the studio and client. The gang at Pixel began to refer to our shoot as “slow TV” as they tuned into our shoot on their workstations and witnessed the 45 seconds being slowly put together over 4 and half days.”

The final result is a beautifully hand-crafted film created by a collaborative team of devoted creatives. We hope you dig it!

‍Behind The Scenes:

‍
Side by sides

‍

‍

MOTION DESIGN, MADE BY HAND

In the age of generative AI, CGI and a myriad of digital techniques, there is nothing that captures an audience’s attention quite like lovingly, hand-crafted stop motion. Viewers can feel the heart and soul of the artists, captured in every frame.

‍- Peter Nizic, Director

‍‍
“It’s like motion graphics without the computer!” is one comment by a viewer inspired by the dedication to this craft.

Cobram Estate is world renowned for their award winning Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Perhaps less well known is their commitment to environmental sustainability. The olive groves at Cobram Estate absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than it takes to produce their oils AND less than 0.5% of their outputs end up in landfill. Our challenge with this project was to come up with an interesting and engaging way to highlight this commitment.

So, what better way to feature this than to recycle organic material, directly from Cobram Estate’s olive groves.

Piecing this project together – leaf by leaf, pit by pit – was an incredibly intricate production for all involved and we’re absolutely delighted with the result.‍

- David Brown, Noisy Beast’s managing director and partner.‍

Considering the cyclical nature of the olive grove life cycle, we decided to keep all motion and transitions flowing in a clockwise rotation, just like every “Life Cycle Diagram” you’ve ever seen in a text book. Similarly, the idea was to continue the circular theme within each set piece to reinforce the concept.

The goal was to create scenes in a simple and effective way, by using organic material sourced directly from the groves of Cobram Estate, such as olives, leaves, branches, olive pits, mulch and soil. We even recreated the iconic Cobram Estate olive oil bottle out of organic material.

When we were first given the brief to create a stop motion film entirely out of organic material and waste, I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind that the whole thing would end up looking like one big, brown pile of dirt. Once the client sent us pictures of the materials, it allowed us to begin the process by creating Photoshop composites of each scene, as loose starting blocks to build on. This gave us an idea of the parameters we were working with and was the first time we were able to envision the colour palette available to us. From here, Art Department was able to develop the look, whilst we started to previz the motion in 2d.

One of the biggest challenges in using organic material in stop motion animation is the fact that, once picked, the leaves, in particular, have a shelf life before they start to wilt and decompose. Stop motion is a long and tedious process, so it was important for us to test how long we could use certain materials, before they would decay.

It became clear that even after one day, the leaves start to curl and change colour and the olives start to rot. This meant that we had to plan our shoot schedule accordingly, making sure we could get through certain scenes quickly. To ensure everything stayed fresh, Art Department could not premake many of the set pieces before we were ready to shoot, so the main set pieces were continually being made in the background, as we were animating.

The amount of planning that goes into a stop motion shoot is insane. You can’t just re-shoot a scene if the client doesn’t like something, so it is a lot of hand holding and problem solving in pre, to ensure everyone knows exactly what they’re getting! It’s essentially a full animation and production piece, in one. An additional challenge with this shoot was working with organic material of all different sizes/decomposing rates - it was half science experiment, half art piece! We had the absolute dream team working on this though, so there was not a frame in the entire piece that was not discussed at length and crafted to perfection. Super proud of the outcome!

- Haley Polacik, Pixel EP

All in all, the time spent in pre-production allowed us to iron out most issues, get the client on side and gave us a clear vision for the film. We spent, a relatively smooth, four and half days on set animating, with a further 2 weeks in post, tackling clean-up, compositing and finishing.

- Director of Photography, Simon Higgins said:

“The really interesting through line of working with Director/Animators and Director/Designers is that they typically have a very specific outcome in mind for the visuals. Sometimes these requests defy gravity or physics and as the cinematographer you’re oftentimes tasked with fitting a pictorial idea into the real world and its limitations. In this case, we were dealing with visual media that has a shelf life of just a few hours and we had to be super efficient with our execution of the stop motion. Fortunately we had a great art director on board, Jacqui Hudson, who along with Director Pete, had run all sorts of tests with the usable dry life of the plants. Jacqui hand built all sorts of miniature and full scale sculpted set pieces and would dress them with organic material immediately prior to the animation. The set pieces were also all of varying depths and I had to devise a descriptive lighting scenario that would create a subtle “on the farm” mood, yet also be generic enough to allow the animation to start at frame 1 and run continuously to frame 1200 without interruption.”

“During the shoot we discovered a nice flickering light effect as a happy accident, as the furnace grill door opened to the fire scene. Pete was able to extract a little fire flicker loop and enhance that.”

“The sheer tiny size of all these particles meant they were really vulnerable to any extraneous movement and environmental factors, often the enemy of stop motion shoots. As always, we were able to capitalise on Dragonframe’s features and we utilised their live view to export to the studio and client. The gang at Pixel began to refer to our shoot as “slow TV” as they tuned into our shoot on their workstations and witnessed the 45 seconds being slowly put together over 4 and half days.”

The final result is a beautifully hand-crafted film created by a collaborative team of devoted creatives. We hope you dig it!

‍Behind The Scenes:

‍
Side by sides

‍

‍