The Creativity Between Creative Jobs

Hi I’m Nat, I’m a rostered director as well as a creative director at Hornet, which means I’m either putting forward my own voice in visual storytelling, or partnering with other creatives/directors to pitch and produce work in a wide range of mediums and styles. After 8+ years at Hornet, you still never know where the day will lead you, creatively. So to keep a fresh perspective and continually improve future work, I make sure our 2D team has space to experiment and play in the brief moments between commercial projects - and this is where the magic happens:

Every quarter we structure dedicated time to explore creative problems with specific goals. So when there’s a window, however small, we’re prepared to use that time to do at least one of these three things:

a. Explore styles/ideas – Being proactive rather than reactive in regards to creative development. However big or small the idea, try not to overthink it, and stay loose.

b. Collaborate – Combine our team’s different disciplines, strengths, and backgrounds in new ways that perhaps haven’t been combined on a project yet.

c. Explore process – Preemptively R&D new processes so that our pipeline’s ready to go on day one and we can be nimble when it comes to production.

There are so many benefits to working this way, but I think the most important benefit to me is that, when reacting to a brief, we’re positioned to offer a distinct creative point of view thanks to this foundation of ongoing thinking and exploration.

Some examples:

‘Walking’

With this hybrid 2D/live action piece in collaboration with Clam Studios, we wanted to create an illustrative dimension to the characters’ wardrobe that tracks with and reacts to their movement like AR filters. The look is hand-drawn 2D animation, but instead of drawing all 30 frames per second dictated by the live-action frame rate, we looked to our senior motion designer Seongjin Yoon, an After Effects legend who has a completely unique approach to working in the space where 2D and motion design overlaps. He developed a unique motion-design approach to clean-up which was extremely efficient without compromising the hand-drawn cel animation look: “We had to integrate the 2D designs without disrupting the footage, and those designs also needed to be represented with smooth animation. Through some tests, I was able to combine technical aspects in After Effects, resulting in a unique piece that maintained the feel of the original video as well as the designs.” – Seonjin Yoon.

'Travel the Vote'

Seongjin and I also made a very quick and dirty test to try an idea of transitioning from one scene to the next based on color blocking, which led to a distinct look for our work with AWAY ‘Travel the Vote’. This test laid the groundwork for approaching production in the most efficient way possible, as we only had three weeks to produce a 90, which was really fun to pull off as a team. 

“This is one of my favourite projects. In fact, stylistically, it was where I felt most confident technically. One of the unique aspects of this project was that there was not a single cut, and all shots were connected. Therefore, one of the most crucial parts was to plan how to approach each scene technically. In the end, it turned out really well, and I had a lot of fun.” – Seongjin Yoon

‘Nightshift’

‘Nightshift’ is a fake trailer inspired by an awesome style frame by Hornet director Renaud Lavency that we all fell in love with. Our goal was to really push the contrast between how graphic and stylised the artwork is and the realism and depth of the animation and camera moves. To capture small details of nuance in the performances, our crazy talented animators Kaycee Nwakudu, Matt Corsillo, Ty Enos, Sami Healy, Hyo Bin Kang filmed all their own reference. And Seongjin’s unique approach to elevating graphic illustration with fluid, realistic animation was equally effective in our work for Paid Leave for All’s ‘Get your Sh*t Together, Baby!’ campaign (it was especially important for those films to look good at a large scale when they screened in Times Square). 

“Personally, I enjoy expressing realistic animation, however, there were parts where we needed to avoid being too realistic, and I liked to work on that balance.” – Seongjin Yoon.

Working on in-between work is so inspiring– it reminds us of what excited us to do this kind of work to begin with. As a team we’re not often all on the same project so we intentionally carve out time to reconnect - we share learnings, what worked, what was challenging and how we overcame it, so we can all learn from the experience. We’re also fans of each other’s work so the energy is very supportive - we’re cheerleaders for each other’s breakthroughs and eager to get feedback from the group. 

“While there is much to learn from client work, I believe there is significant skill improvement in the technical aspects when creating personal projects. This practice has enabled me to perform tasks flexibly when working on client projects or participating in ongoing tasks” – Seongjin Yoon

I’m really happy to have found this dialogue between jobs influencing side projects and vice versa. And as the millions of images we consume a day look increasingly dystopian and soulless, personally, I find myself more than ever drawn to seeing and making work that builds upon the creativity of multiple creative minds and embraces the messy happy accidents that human hands in particular are so good at creating.