Reels, Rebrands, And Records Broken
Animation and Motion Design Inspiration For The Home Stretch.
Keys & Curves is here to unlock inspiration for all things animation, straight to your inbox, every Monday.
šš» How you doing?
Weāre back after a two-week work sprint that saw us travel from Milwaukee to LA back to Milwaukee and then turn it all around to Las Vegas for two days and two nights prepping a project. All that and Thanksgiving snuck in there too ā whew! š„±
š Whatās inside:
Motion Design: Studio reels and rebrands
Animation: Moana makes a big splash
Tools: Under the radar new QoL finds
Spotlight: Adam Buritsch wows us with his MOHO prowess
PSA: Demo Reel Review
Before we get to all the Inspiro Goodness, a public service announcement:
Iām teaming up with the fine folks at Gunner School on December 12th to do a demo reel review session; Iāve been doing free Open Office Hoursā¢ sessions for years and now Iām doing one live!
Sign up here and submit your reel over here.
Now on to the INSPIRO!
MOTION MADNESS
Itās Beginning To Feel Likeā¦ Time For A New Reel?
The end of the year is always a time of reflection but it feels like the end of 2024 is seeing studios going into overdrive when it comes to rebrands, manifestos, and year-end show reels ā hereās some that hit our feeds recently:
CLIM Studio goes extra BOLD on their new visual identity with a new manifesto, identity, and website.
LAUNDRY goes deep on their rebrand with a totally fresh visual identity
State Design launched The Unspeakable World, their third studio manifesto.
IV Studio is now HEY NEIGHBOR!
ANIMATION STATION
Animation Saves Again
Moana 2 brings in the bucks for Disney ($600M global in less than 2 weeks?!?) and itās a story as old as time: animation saves Hollywood time and time again despite it always being treated like a second-class citizen by those running the industry.
A cute (and a little sinister!) animation by Gobelins alum nabaatian
20 seconds of Tie Fighter Takeoff set to heavy metal riffs taken from fascinating fan film:
REMINDER: Rise of the TMNT continues to be amazing and waiting for you to watch it over on Netflix and/or Paramount+ ā if you love the Turtles AND amazing anime styled blowout fights, you need to find this series and give it some love.
TOOL TIME
Quality of Lifeā¦ Improved!
Black Friday and Cyber Monday came and went; what did you pick up to make your curve wrangling a little bit easier? We ran into a lot of new little tools during this last 2 week work sprint that eased our keyslinging pains.
āš» Skew Pro has to be seen to be believed ā itās like having an entirely new curve editor in After Effects thatās not only powerful but just ridiculously fun to animate and adjust with. When was the last time you said that?!?
We had to build a LOT of text boxes that responded to the size & length of the text but could still be styled AND connected to one another ā there are a lot of Text Box tools out there for After Effects but none of them match up to the power of Karton šŖš»
Mask & Layer Splitter helps you separate things like custom type quickly with a bunch of helper tools for cleaning it all up.
The one-two power combo of Overlord 2 from Battle Axe and Telegram from Loop made the constant client updates for stacked and styled type ridiculously fast compared to doing it manually.
Overlord 2 now supports FIGMA š alongside Adobe Illustrator and itās an Everyday Keyframing essential over here.
Telegram lets you apply an animation to stacked text and QUICKLY break it out into lines that can be offset ā hardly sounds essential but try doing this 5X in ten minutes at the end of a client deadline and no one will ever pry it from your cold claws again.
Speaking of making revisions quickly, Speed from AE Screens helped us retime moments within AE quickly, almost making it feel like we were working inside an NLE within After Effects.
SPOTLIGHT
SPEEDLAG, aka Adam Buritsch
This mindblowing Moho rig caught our attention and we havenāt been able to take our eyes off illustrator and animator Adam Buritschās work since. Weāre huge fans of anyone working in Moho and Adamās character style is perfect for that vector animation tool.
Sailor Moon, Evangelion, and retro-future gaming designs? Oh YES.
Check them out on:
Know someone that should spend some time in our Spotlight? Let us know who!
Thatās a wrap for this weekā weāre working on an end-of-year rush of posts covering our fave studios, artists, tools, work and more to put a bow on 2024.
Until then, keep on slinging those keys and riding the curves! š¤©