Hocus Pocus Studios Ltd

12/06/2020

Social Media Video Production

Making videos for social media that stand out

11/06/2020

How long should your video be?

Attention spans aren’t getting shorter, it’s just harder to stay focused in such a hyperlinked world. If your content is good enough people will stay engaged. Ask Wagner fans.

Read in full here folks:

https://hocuspocus.studio/the-scoop-london-animation-studios/

09/06/2020

09/06/2020

LEGO Play Tips

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.

09/06/2020

Lived Experiences

Essex Youth Offending Services asked Hocus Pocus Studio to make a series of animations about young people caught up in criminal gangs and county lines in particular. Over 50 young people, social workers, teachers and police officers were interviewed and their stories turned into four films.

The animations take a non-judgmental and unflinching look at the rapidly escalating situation. The often bleak and frustrating world we discover is reflected in the striking art direction and sound design, calculated to engage rather than glorify those involved. This is a short teaser edit of the 4 films.

09/06/2020

Social Media Video Production

Once upon a time you could make one single film and that could do for your product launch, TVC, corporate video – and then b**g it on Facebook too and forget about it. But the rapidly fragmenting world of social and broadcast video has made things a lot more complicated.

Social media video production is a pretty baggy term – sorry – but this is where we make films to deliver across your various digital channels. We’ve worked hard on understanding exactly what types of content work on the different platforms and how to get the best engagements and results.

09/06/2020

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.

Of course the main benefit of animation over live-action is that it’s much easier to do from a distance. In fact, for most animators, the more distance the better, particularly if you don’t have to talk to anyone, ever.

Shooting live action is a different story. Even the smallest of productions need at least 500 people to fuss around making you redo a shot you were happy with on the first take anyway. It’s expensive, fiddly and very hard to do at arm’s length. For now it seems hard to plan for much beyond a simple greenscreen shoot in a studio.

Like most London animation studios, Hocus Pocus switched to remote working pretty easily. The main difficulty has been adjusting to the general tone. We tend to make colourful, positive, personality driven films. Most of the time they’re flogging something ultimately, or at least getting people to go somewhere where they might buy something. So when people are only buying bog roll and dried pasta, there’s not much for us to say.

But as the lockdowns around the world begin to lift, so does the tone and visual language. We move away from the DIY adverts, the zoom captures, the regional reassuring (or patronizing) VOs and we emerge to a brighter, colour-filled (albeit CGI) world. And us animation studios can get back to doing what we do best: getting people to buy a load of stuff that of course they don’t know they need yet.

09/06/2020

Hocus Pocus Studios Ltd

09/06/2020

Hocus Pocus Studio Teaser Reel

That’s a very short summary of the work we’ve done since we opened our busy London animation studio in 2019

09/06/2020

Hocus Pocus Studios Ltd's cover photo