SEED
Animated stories crafted with personality, warmth and wit.
Seed’s focus is on character and story, with a liberal sprinkling of personality, warmth and wit. These are their magic seeds, and it’s how they engage your viewers.
The studio’s driving force is their creative thinking which enables them to answer briefs of all shapes and sizes, using a myriad of different animation techniques and styles. This creative thinking extends to offer a valued perspective as early as idea conception. It enables Seed to develop animation specific scripts, adapt to briefs and think critically and creatively outside of ‘traditional’ disciplines and draw from their broader experiences.
SEED
Seed’s focus is on character and story, with a liberal sprinkling of personality, warmth and wit. These are their magic seeds, and it’s how they engage your viewers.
The studio’s driving force is their creative thinking which enables them to answer briefs of all shapes and sizes, using a myriad of different animation techniques and styles. This creative thinking extends to offer a valued perspective as early as idea conception. It enables Seed to develop animation specific scripts, adapt to briefs and think critically and creatively outside of ‘traditional’ disciplines and draw from their broader experiences.
SEED
SEED / Showreel Fall 2022
Seed / Sage - First Order TVC
The campaign was driven by real voices of business, and so the treatment of the films required a personal touch to visually echo these quotes by real people. Seed chose a tactile illustrative style with bright colors, featuring ‘big friendly giants’ who would integrate playfully on black and white live action backdrops. The voices would lead the development of the stories.
Seed / Yelp for Restaurants - Turn the Tables
Yelp’s first campaign since 2016 celebrates restaurants’ ability to ‘Turn the Tables’ in this fun 60 second film. It features three restaurateurs who managed to turn the unpleasantness of the pandemic into positive, and sometimes selfless, situations - by giving food out to local people and offering opportunities to chefs who were struggling to get by. Seed jumped in once they had chosen to lead with 3 of the most inspiring stories, featuring Ketsuda, Glen and Ann. Besides the personalities of these people, Seed had rich visual pickings from each of their restaurants. They created a miniature style environment, with larger than life characters, and a device based on the ‘Turn the Tables’ theme where empty cafes turned into thriving spaces.Seed had the opportunity to visually develop this from scratch. It's a treat to have such an enthusiastic client willing to creatively explore.
Seed / Sage - Success
Sage enables businesses to flow because owners are spending more time doing what they do best, while Sage deals with their accountancy. And flow is represented by the green ‘Flow line’ - it's considered the enabler. It can be playful and helpful - Seed imagined it to be like a dolphin swimming alongside you. A nice friendly personality to help you on your way.
This project has been a thoroughly rewarding experience for all at Seed - being part of the creative team that helped to develop this campaign from early days, and working with some phenomenal talent along the way.
Seed / Hefty - Ecosave
Periscope, based in sunny (in summer) Minnesota came to Seed (virtually) asking for their help in creating some commercials promoting compostable tableware. After their initial excitement had died down, Seed were relieved to hear that it was going to involve a jam packed jolly animal/insect parade. Alongside their usual bold and humorous offering, Seed pitched the idea of animating the happy throng over custom built miniature backgrounds… which is great if you’re not in the middle of a global lockdown. Thankfully, lockdown finished juuuuuuust in the nick of time and made all their tableware dreams come true. Seed illustrated some nostalgic Fleischer inspired characters, injecting them with OTT emotion and focused on telling the extremely short story, following an ever growing parade, holding aloft this sturdy AND good-for-nature picnic set through lush woodland. Watch out for Comeback King Worm, Salmon Sandwich Bear and other blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. Much fun was had by all. More pls.
Seed / GNI
Watch our man Dan introduce us to renewable gas as he strolls through glorious paper Irish countryside, quaint paper Irish villages and fresh paper Irish pastures... luckily for him and everything in his paper world, it’s not raining. The very lovely creative genius Hattie Newman built a lot of the props in this film for Gas Networks Ireland using her signature paper style, for real, before we ‘digitalized’ them. Seed got intimately familiar with all the different types of paper, folds, cuts, tears, bends, creases, wrinkles, crumples and then replicated all the real world paper physics into the world of CGI. Why on earth did Seed go to such great lengths to build this papercraft world in CG? Simples. Maximum flexibility. Clients love to change things. All the time. So this way we have control of, well, everything, right up to the day of delivery. No putting all our eggs in the basket of a complex-as-feck, 1 shot, 40” stop motion shoot.
Seed / Antibiotics
Who’d have thought pills could be such fun? A lesson for us all…This faux stop-motion commercial for the NHS Antibiotics campaign, tells a cautionary tale about the trouble with too much pill popping.
Seed / Breast Cancer Awareness
Seed produced an uplifting 30 second animated film in association with Breast Cancer Care for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Seed asked some of their favourite animators from around the world to contribute to the film and the cause.
Each animator was given a different word for breast to interpret into just under 1 second of animation. All the clips were then assembled to create the film. The end result is a playful and diverse collaboration that promotes the importance of checking for breast cancer.
Seed / Bishop Briggs - Baby
Seed produced this music video through Island Records, featuring Bishop herself and her boyfriend in a trippy love story, exploring the obsessions and passions that help to define their relationship. Malia James, (ordinarily a live action director) called on Seed to produce the animated promo alongside illustrator Anja Slibar. Neil Kidney and Morgan Powell from Seed animation directed, focusing on realistic performances from the main characters. During production Bishop was touring so there was no direct reference for her singing the song. The animators at Seed had to rely on YouTube videos to grasp her character traits, including lip movement, personality and style.
Seed / Shell Coffee Stories
Ironically, creating top drawer latte art requires a steady hand, so when UK Latte Art Champ Dhan Tamang started ‘churning out’ the 200+ lattes to create this film, Seed was very keen on ensuring his caffeine consumption was zero. No sneaky sampling of the product, Dhan. Anyway, Iris asks Seed to pitch on this film for Shell - authenticity of coffee is key, so they propose working with Dhan on the world’s first ‘Latte-mation’*. Seed previz animate the coffee cup characters initially and he copies the sequences, frame by frame. Then Seed go and bang it all together in a CG environment and bash the render button. Oh, how we wish it was that simple.
*probs.
Seed / Likely Loans
Likely Loans came to Seed asking for some playful commercials to air on TV. They provide loans for those that can’t get bank loans, and their repayment terms are more favourable than the payday loan companies currently operating. Likely Loans have a key phrase that encapsulates what they offer - loans for all shapes and sizes. And so Seed wrote a script around this phrase that played on both financial shape and physical shape. Simple shapes for characters, and the gym setting was a great backdrop for that. While the voice over was doing most of the heavy lifting from a message point of view, Seed wanted to add humour around the shapes themselves and the setting that they are in. One of the most intense animation discussions was based around how much swing Circle’s little fella should have.
Seed / P & O - What Will You Rediscover
Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out scores this 30 second commercial for P&O Ferries that Seed directed through agency MRM Meteorite.
Taking the creative lead from last year’s commercial, Seed were tasked with developing his paper craft world to include wider vistas, more environments and more complex character animation. It was their mission to develop the commercial in CG, but stay true to the paper craft of the previous commercial. The plan was to gradually transform the white paper world into full color as the commercial progressed. The concept behind this was that the color in each scene would emanate from the couple as their rekindled love blossomed. To transform shots into full color Seed devised various different techniques for paper rolls to reveal the color across each scene through the commercial as it would have been achieved in paper craft. Seed added paper craft details such as paper imperfections, all flavors of cuts and folds and pared down character animation to achieve the tactile finish.