Matt describes his practice as working in the space between what looks good and what actually works. Most of it is spent getting bold ideas through to the commercial market intact. The loops shown here are what is left when the second half of that falls away.
I often keep little visually pleasing nuggets, or rejected elements from larger projects, and get a bit of joy out of developing them later without the confines of the brand or brief.
Two of the three began as a listings poster for The Mash House. The stone textures in them were built from a mix of digital and hand-drawn graphics, a method he arrived at sideways.
I’d been lamenting all the AI discourse recently, so I tried to put it to use.
Compositing each frame by hand pulled it further from the screen again. His background is in illustration, and it shows in the result. The textures read as rubbed and uneven rather than rendered.
The third loop started elsewhere. Matt had developed a series of marques for a kombucha brand, one for each flavour, before the client went quiet. The set sat finished and unused. Frame-by-frame animation is slower than the alternatives and less precise. That is the appeal.
Every time I play with frame-by-frame motion I’m amazed by how forgiving it can be. There’s a nice aesthetic to it that gets lost in more sophisticated software, but really pops when using relatively contemporary imagery.
The looseness that more capable software smooths out is what holds these together. Against clean contemporary imagery it registers as made by hand.
All motion: MRTN Studio
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