Fun fact: when we started Chicken Fruit in 2019, we sort of intended to be a motion design studio.
Over the years, we’ve drifted more and more into fun, colourful character animation, which we love! But it’s extremely satisfying to add motion to other stuff, too.
Recently we’ve worked with some international motion design studios on award-winning campaigns that we can’t include in our portfolio due to the terms of our contract. But we loved working on them! We’d love to work on more! So we figured we’d edit together a motion-specific showreel to let people know that we can actually make things other than colourful lil guys with cute faces.
(Our animation showreel, showing the aforementioned colourful lil guys, is on our homepage.)
wait, but What is the difference between animation and motion design?
There is definitely some overlap – we’ve included some of our digital out-of-home (DOOH) campaign work on both our animation and motion design showreels, for example.
But at Chicken Fruit, we tend to think of animation as involving characters and story. It doesn’t necessarily have to be human or animal characters – or even anything with a face – but there’s usually some form of life or feeling being portrayed on screen.
Motion design, by contrast, allows us to animate information. It could be any kind of information – in our showreel above, we’ve broken it down roughly into several categories, including:
Product renders – displaying physical objects in a fun, cinematic or engaging way
Branding – bringing logos to life or otherwise representing a brand visually
UI animation – UI (user interface) covers screens, technology, holograms – futuristic or retro or anywhere in between
Live-action compositing – incorporating information or branding into real-life filmed footage
Infographics and educational – maps, charts, graphs, statistics – anything that explains new topics to an audience
All of the above are specialist skills, and there are designers out there who are experts at slick 2D vector infographics but have never had to make a 3D model look identical to the real thing as part of a product launch campaign. Luckily, we’ve been working in motion design for long enough that we’ve been able to dabble in basically everything. Much more fun that way!
Chicken Fruit is a London-based motion design and animation studio fully set up for remote or freelance work. We can fit into any pipeline, whether that’s slotting into a bigger team for a week or two, or handling a project from conception to delivery. Our style is super flexible – which is actually a big problem for our SEO (🙃), but it’s a huge benefit when it comes to adapting our work to fit a brief.
Most of the projects above were made using a combination of Cinema4D, Redshift and Adobe After Effects, but we’ve recently been working in Blender, Affinity and Procreate and we’re loving them! We have experience of delivering projects for social media, mobile apps and games, internal brand communications and broadcast.
We have a studio policy of not working within workflows that require generative AI, or on projects that promote generative AI tools, but apart from that – we’d love to work with you! Please feel free to get in touch for a no-strings-attached chat or project quote.
