Clim Studio creates buoyant animation footage for a stock image site

When designing footage for Artgrid – a royalty-free photo sharing website – Clim studio didn’t rely on a specific style. Clim, who leads the Barcelona-based studio, maintains the mantra: “ideas go first and style is just an aesthetic response to what the project needs in order to be successful.”

The stock footage platform asked Clim to create something fun to include in its always-growing catalogue. The studio answered with the hope of offering an “extensive texture-rich library of shapes that could be composed and animated in multiple ways.” Clim wanted to give the viewer the feeling of randomness and so designed and crafted each of the elements "thinking about morphologic contrast and visual richness. Bold, simple yet detailed elements mixed with appealing materials and meticulous textures.”

Clim – a creative director, designer and producer – is a self-labelled graphic designer “at the core” so he gives importance to detail, colour and composition. Artgrid gave Clim a “carte blanche” to create whatever the studio felt they needed to appeal to the site’s subscribers.

“[Artgrid] came to Clim Studio after releasing “It’s About Time”, a CG animated kinetic poem,” says Clim. “After having a few conversations, we realised they were looking for concepts and pieces similar to what we had created before. That’s why in a way we are giving them CG work for now.”

For Clim, the most challenging part of the brief was to create high quality content in a way that was beautiful and abstract enough for people to use as footage for their own creations, “and also profitable in terms of budget and timing.” As usual with design briefs, deadlines were tight so they had to think of beautiful things that could be achieved in a short period of time. “That meant being very organised during production and having a clear direction from the very beginning.”

The studio focuses mainly on animation, which Clim explains is a very step-by-step process. First comes the concept: “Wording and mood boards are crucial so I make sure the client knows what we are looking to create.” Once Artgrid chose the concept they liked the most, they did “very vague sketches,” Clim says. “Just outlining a possible composition and also a little write-up about what the animation will look like. Once that was approved we moved onto design and style-framing. That’s where most of our energy is focused,” Clim describes.

“Composition, objects, colours, materials, textures, lighting… all play a very important aesthetic role in emphasising the purpose and concept of the piece.” After the rendering process, Clim likes to finish the film with beautifully crafted sound design; “Anything to help us bring the project together and show it to the world.”

The varied designs come from Clim along with Everthon Estevan and Rishabh Gandhi, who also animated with Goodog.