Scoops

This much we’ve learned as an animation studio:  Big companies want to appear small, small companies want to appear big.  Small is cute, trustworthy, hand-rendered, authentic.  All the values you don’t normally associate with a business you’re looking to buy electricity or insurance from. Nowhere is this clearer than in the style of voiceover chosen.  As big business looks to reassure, comfort and ultimately make us part with our cash, it does so through the unthreatening regional tones of plump dinner ladies offering another spoon of custard.

Hocus Pocus Studio is a leading London animation studio making films for brands, businesses and agencies across the world. Motion design and video production for social, broadcast and film. From commercials to title sequences, explainers to cinemagraphs, gifs, loops, and game trailers we make films with spirit.

You won’t get to the end of this post, right?  It’s not a video, meme, gif or tiktok so it will be curtains by the time you get to the second paragraph.  Because people have really short attention spans – don’t they?

Conquest, war, famine and plague notwithstanding notwithstanding, it’s probably not a bad time to be one of the busy London animation studios.  People may be broke, scared and more interested in proving sourdough than being nudged along your marketing funnel but that will change soon enough.

As a busy London animation studio, at Hocus Pocus Studio our services are always evolving. Once upon a time you could make one single film and that could do ...

Successful advertising begins with effective communication; telling your brand’s message in a memorable way that will have impact with the target audience.  Emotional storytelling through video can be a very powerful method of engaging that audience. Here are three important considerations of emotional storytelling through video:

What a lovely brand and project to work on. These little snackable social films were to show different ways you could use LEGO to play games, inside and out, as well as just building stuff. Everyone’s looking for ways to encourage nippers away from screens, so here are 3 great ways of doing that. Working with such lovely illustrations and bright colours made it a real pleasure to animate.

Client: LEGO
Agency: Edelman
Director: Justin Lowings
Creative Director: James Murphy
Producer: Miles Paulley
Illustration and Art Direction: Philipa Rabbit
Animation / post: Justin Lowings, Rob Wilkes
Sound design: Richard Lewis

From the first motion projection to modern computer-generated graphic films, the filmmaking has gone through many revolutions.

Video is an incredibly powerful, naturally persuasive medium that can move using a unique way. Video can engage, inform and entertain in a way unlike any other tool available to brands and…

Hocus Pocus Studio is a leading making films for brands, businesses and agencies across the world. Motion design and video production for social, broadcast and film. From commercials to title sequences, explainers to cinemagraphs, gifs, loops, and game trailers we make films with spirit.

Leading London animation studio. Animation services. Motion design and video production for social, broadcast and film. We make films with spirit.

Work / American Express / Nurture
American Express
Nurture
We love to mix live action and 2d animation, and here’s one of our favourites. These films show how everyday spending on your Amex can lead to some special family rewards. A wonderful young actor, a cute crab and a puffing red train made this a dream to work on.

Client: American Express
Agency: Digitas
Creative Director: Rob Ferneyhough
Producer: Miles Paulley
Illustration and Art Direction: Theresa Hilsden
VFX Supervision / Animation / Post: Dean Smith
Sound design: Aaron May

Business to business video doesn’t need to be boring! Here’s a good example of a film we made dealing with a tricky subject (non-relational databases if you’re interested) in an engaging way. It’s full of colour, bounce and lashings of personality.

Our take on the traditional big pillars of the video marketing world: Explainer Videos, Thought Leadership Videos, Brand Videos, Product Videos,Testimonials

Rem-Fit approached us to make some social media films for two of their Mattresses. The brief was to create something dreamy and illustrative, that reflects the hybrid layers and cooling properties of the mattresses. We organised and directed the shoot, and illustrated some abstract worlds, before bringing it all together in our London Studio.

Client: Rem-Fit
Director: James Murphy
Kit: Karma
DOP: Craig Herd
Art Director & illustrations: Theresa Hilsden
Post Production & Animation: Justin Lowings

Video is a powerful content medium for storytelling. It can have a big impact on the success of your promotional campaigns and content marketing efforts.

Here’s a next-gen explainer we made for UniLIVE. We wanted to ditch the tired tropes of the explainers that launched a thousand startups over the past decade; they’ve become a tired and generic. Our goal was to to create something slicker, more atmospheric and forward looking.

So that meant a snappy script, delicious art direction and building a world to fill with all the lovely content. The job was epic, but we had fun along the way, particularly with the spoof OOH adverts. More of this please!

Craft Films chose Hocus Pocus Studio to do the graphics in this documentary about the making of the new X-Class from Princess Yachts. Much longer format than most films we would work on, the challenge throughout was to stop this being a boring talking heads video. With such great footage to work with we quickly established a graphic style that would keep things visually sparky. We wanted the graphics to feel somehow organic, but still elegant and contemporary, hopefully we went some way to achieving that.

Digitas chose us to make an online video for GSKs Zovirax Duo. The film used a futuristic UI style, following on from their existing television campaign. The video was used online and on social media to give people an in-depth explanation into how the dual action ingredients help prevent cold sores.

Agency: Digitas
Creative Director: Rob Ferneyhough
Design & Animation: Dean Smith
Additional Animation: Henrique Bispo

Business to Business (B2B) marketing doesn’t have to be boring! This was the starting point for a new type of marketing video being imagined by Hocus Pocus Studio in London. In many ways Uniled solutions was the perfect client for such an ambitious project: a business that defines itself by redefining excellence creatively and technically.

This is the safety film that played for visitors before the ride for Dinosaurs in the wild. We had a pretty open brief to make it fun and colourful.

So with some nice character design and a few visual gags we made a fun little film to pass the waiting time.

for more information please visit www.hocuspocus.studio

A manga-inspired piece for Princess Yachts for the launch of their new R class performance yacht. Princess are all about hand-crafting and attention to detail, so we wanted to reflect that in this distinctive little film.

We love to mix 2d and 3d, traditional techniques with the new stuff. All comes together nicely here in a colourful piece that has us all wanting to mess about in boats.

for more information please visit www.hocuspocus.studio

Channel 4 commissioned us to make a series of short films about the science of falling in love. The tricky part was to make something fun, a bit naughty, but still full of the important technical bits. As we were making 7 mins worth of animation we had to keep the style nice and simple, but somehow that adds to the charm.

for more information please see: www.hocuspocus.studio