The Conversational Blog: When Branding Meets Tone and Why Leaving Fingerprints is Important.
I’ve been thinking about something recently.
Blogging is a weird thing to do.
There’s many styles and approaches that one could take when writing one, particularly a less personal one like this.
When I first started writing these blogs the most difficult question for me to answer was how I would actually write them.
My first attempts to write blogs always erred on the side of formality and used plural pronouns to try and disguise the fact that this is a one-man team as of right now.
We here at todolaMEDIA… Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.
It didn’t suit me; I’m too prone to sarcasm and random tangents to really pull it off. Most importantly though, it didn’t suit todolaMEDIA.
But why is that?
Well, it comes back to something I once heard something about Aardman Animations. An idea that really stuck with me and has influenced everything I’ve done since I first learnt it.
Animators at Aardman don’t wear gloves to hide their fingerprints when they work on stop-motion films.
That’s because those fingerprints and imperfections are an important point of the charm and the appeal of stop-motion.
For just an instant you get to see that these incredible films are still just things that people have made with their own bare hands.
That philosophy of not hiding your fingerprints is something that I’ve wanted to stand by myself.
It’s the human touch that makes me love animation and reminds people that
Anyone can animate.
Letting my personality shine through on my blogs is part of that same philosophy. Even when someone else starts writing biweekly blogs for todolaMEDIA letting their individual personalities shine through will be just as important then as it is for me today.
Because here at todolaMEDIA we also show our fingerprints.
And hopefully maybe that human touch will inspire someone else to take that first step and just start animating.
Reece Morgado, todolaMEDIA
This post might seem a little more bare than the usual ones. That’s because I wasn’t able to write about what I really wanted to write about this week… the announcement of todolaMEDIA’s next short film.
But before you go don’t forget…
The Biweekly Recommendation
Don't Wake Robby by Robert Winchester
I wanted to talk about something a little more rough around the edges this week to keep in with the theme. Don’t let the nearly 20 minute length of the YouTube video fool you, ‘Don’t Wake Robby’ is actually only around five minutes long with the rest of the video being dedicated to some extras and behind-the-scenes inclusions.
Robert Winchester, or Bobert-Rob was one of my biggest inspirations for becoming an animator. Today I still look back on his animations with both fondness and nostalgia.
They’re rough around the edges, they’re full of imperfections (or digital fingerprints) but have an irreplicable charm to them. ‘Don’t Wake Robby’ might not be the most refined or polished animation of all time, but it still a piece of work that inspired me and continues to make me laugh over a decade later.