Every year we face the same delightful problem: we make a lot of videos… and people rarely have time to watch all of them. Shocking, we know.
Enter the studio reel.
Our reel is our chance to take a step back, look at the work we’re most proud of, and stitch together a fast-paced snapshot of what we’ve been creating lately. It’s less of a “greatest hits” album and more of a chaotic mixtape of styles, stories and strange little moments we’ve animated over the past year.
Before we jump into animating, we spend a lot of time figuring out what the story actually needs to do.
Some projects need to explain complex ideas clearly. Others need to inspire, persuade, or make people care about something they hadn’t thought about before. Our job is to understand the message, the audience, and the outcome our clients are aiming for.
For the reel, the strategy is simple: pick the moments that best capture what we do - storytelling, design, and animation that works hard but still knows how to have a good time.
Once we know what we want to show, the real challenge begins: squeezing a year’s worth of work into a few minutes without it feeling like an animation speedrun.
We sift through dozens of projects, hunting for the most interesting visuals, clever transitions, and moments that make us quietly say, “oh yeah, that one turned out sliiiiiiick.”
Then we stitch them together into something that flows, feels energetic, and shows the range of styles we love experimenting with.
One of the things we’re proud of is that our projects rarely look the same. Different stories call for different styles - bold, minimal, playful, cinematic, occasionally slightly chaotic (in a good way).
The reel embraces that variety. It jumps between colour palettes, illustration styles, motion techniques, and visual worlds to show the breadth of what our team can create.
If anything, it’s a reminder that our animators have far too many creative ideas and not nearly enough hours in the day.
Reels might look effortless, but they take a surprising amount of tinkering... just like any client work. If anything sometimes it's worse.
We test pacing, tweak transitions, swap clips in and out, and argue (politely) about which moments deserve their place in the spotlight. Music gets adjusted. Timing gets tightened. Someone inevitably says “just one more tweak” about seventeen times.
Eventually everything clicks into place and the reel starts to feel less like a collection of clips and more like a proper showcase of our work.
The final reel is our yearly reminder of just how many interesting stories we get to help tell.
It’s also a quick way for new clients to see what we’re about - creative storytelling, thoughtful design, and animation that makes complex ideas easier (and more enjoyable) to understand.
Plus, it gives our team a good excuse to sit back, watch the finished piece, and say “hey, we made some pretty cool stuff this year.”
Not bad for a bunch of people who spend most of their time passionately discussing fonts and easing curves.
