Blog

Daniella was interviewed by the lovely local Market Harborough magazine MaHa Magazine. She tidied the studio specially in preparation for having another human come to visit.   You can see the whole magazine online at www.mahamagazine.co.uk It's such a lovely...

A small timelapse of when Harry came to visit. 

Happy Halloween! In like, you know, an old Japan sort of way.

Our biggest Catfish made a sign on the train down to London for the Final Say march. She's proudly displaying it outside Buckingham Palace. The little one is having more fun playing under the A-boards.

We decided to set ourselves the challenge of animating outside of the comfort of our studio. That meant, no control over lighting and no power sockets for our laptop and camera. So it was a race agaisnt battery power, daylight and the elements to see what we could...

Everyone loves paper animations, right? And everyone loves a good film noir, yeah? Well, we decided to combine the two and this is what happened. We made these for Vine, when that was a thing. So now we've decided to give them a new home here, comfortably in our blog....

Here at Catfish, we do enjoy making a new font from time to time. Here is our latest one. It's called Namazu.  All our fonts are handmade. So we drew it, scanned it, vectorized it, then fonted it. Here's our old Catfish font that we made for the Flora TV Campaigns....

Some days you get to animate the Hogwarts Express. Some days you get to actually go on the Hogwarts Express. Some days you get engaged on the Hogwarts Express. Some days you get a LEGO engagement ring on the Hogwarts Express.

An animation we made to celebrate International Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you.

A sneak peek behind the scenes for our LEGO Technic Porsche 911 RSR animations. We made 8 stop motion animations to screen during the ad breaks of Mission Ignition on Channel 4 this year.   Who needs a fancy set up to capture a timelapse? Not us, that's for sure!...

Some days you get to bring your children into the studio and they make an animation. These are good (still slightly stressful) days. Here’s an Animation our 3 year old Catfish made. She made the character herself from wood, drew the background, recorded the sound...

Well, where else am i meant to put him when I need to do some work in the studio? Disclaimer: the box held him for approximately 1 minute until he leant back and ripped it open.

  These pieces are inspired by traditional Chinese pen-jing, literally 'potted landscape'. Each landscape has two components: mountains and water, or shan-shui. Each shan-shui landscape is its own world. Not a representation. An actual world. In a pot. We made...

SUMMER Pour hot tea and wait / Thick summer breeze; tea’s gone cold. / No one came today

SPRING Wet rock, spring splashes / New leaves welcome old friends home / Two cranes, and three eggs

WINTER Winter claws at door / Burn slow incense and watch for / Blossom in the snow

Here are some photos showing how we made these little potted paper landscapes. All cut, folded and stuck by hand using a whole lot of knife blades and our 2 favourite pairs of scissors (RIP).  

Timelapse? Or Stopmotion? Some shots we created for a short film by the ever wonderful, Rollo Hollins. We simulated a time-lapse effect by moving the key light frame by frame.

For our Cheerios TV campaign, every single Cheerio featured in the adverts had to audition. It was a tiring and delicious work.

How's your desk these days? Does it stress you out? All those post-it notes, the migratory ballpoints, the wrappers from last week's lunches, the email alerts popping up on your screen, one after the other. Another lunchtime meeting is it. Yeah that's fine. No you...

Animation's great. Fact. We loves it. We longs for it. We gets the shakes when it's not happening. We needs it. But we don't stop at animation. Nope. We'll squeeze into magazines, up all over billboards, down the side of bus stop six sheets. We'll bark and wobble...

Quite often we have to make new pieces for projects that we're pitching on. Here are a few leftovers from a pitch that didn't go ahead. We like how they turned out so wanted to share them.  

Some more handmade leftovers from a pitch that disappeared. This paper castle is 10cm high, including the turrets. Everythig was cut out by hand, including the little portcullis.  

Get ready for blast off! This paper rocket is around 10cm high and the rivets are 1mm. Fiddley.  

Eat Create Refresh Repeat We made this film for a competition so we could take this technique out for a spin. Hand-drawn animation in a live action world. It’s a classic style. You get that anything’s possible sort of feeling. Of course, when you’re shooting live...

December turned up all unexpectedly and we realised we hadn't done enough good in 2014. So we designed and donated some paper Christmas decorations for an exhibition called A Long Way From Home. All the proceeds went to Crisis at Christmas. We sold out, raising enough...

We made some written instructions to go in each of the packs that we made for the Crisis at Christmas packs and here are the photo instructions that went alongside them. So if you fancy making your own mini cheese, now you can.