Bringing great characters to life in animation, VFX and design

It’s no secret the creative industries are being impacted by wide-spread travel and live shoot restrictions. This has seen disruption to campaign productions across the world. With no immediate signs of the current constraints improving, how as a global creative community can we find innovative solutions that enable us to keep making great advertising and telling awe inspiring brand stories for our clients?

The option to create brilliant work whilst staying put has been at our fingertips since the inception of The Mill 30 years ago. Creators have used the art of animation to tell stories for over a century. Animation & VFX helps us bring to life the most imaginative environments and characters – transporting us to new worlds and augmenting the real world we live in.

Things have changed and developed fast in the animation industry with creativity and technology becoming ever more intertwined. We are increasingly finding these developments are enhancing our ability to create impact, with demand for innovation pushing the boundaries of quality digital content. Impressive, impactful animation has never been more accessible.

As experts in this medium, it’s up to us to re-define the future of the industry by actively pursuing, researching and developing new ways to tell even more immersive stories.

Mill Creative Director Michael Chapman comments. “In the world of Animation and VFX, we’ve been solving logistical problems for years. Creative flexibility is critical in advertising – it’s what we do, day in and day out. We create unique and bespoke environments & characters that often don’t exist, at least often not in the desired format. There are so many ways to create illusions without visiting far-flung locations.”

From environmental digital matte painting to photo-real CGI characters crafted pixel by pixel, the possibilities of what can be achieved through digital animation are restricted only by the imagination.

Having crafted explosions, monsters and new worlds for PlayStation, as well as developing fully CGI cars for Audi, Chevrolet and Honda and meticulously animating photo-real characters for O2, SSE and PETA, our global network of animators, visual effects artists and designers are no strangers to creating the extraordinary.

Whether across linear film, new realities or experiential marketing, success is all in the storytelling. Animation and visual effects will continue to help us tell stories and communicate with audiences in a time where communication is of utmost importance.

At The Mill, we create the extraordinary. Check out some of our favourite character animation projects to get a sense of what is possible.