Animate! Pick Up Your Pencil with Volstok
Volstok is the creative animation studio that molds emotion into character. Led by Wouter Sel and Johanna Keppens, they shape versatile, offbeat, and striking visual worlds, with their work creating memorable ideas and transforming them into moving pictures.
With a hyper talented team of animators, motion designers, developers and illustrators, Volstok creates exceptional content for adventurous brands in all sorts of visual media. From animation to mixed media, gaming content, video mapping or creative code, Volstok knows the building blocks of all round visual communication.
Animation allows artistic ideas to develop to their fullest, it speaks to the imagination and it opens opportunities to create unique and remarkable content. Their passion is to create something out of nothing, visualise the imaginary, the impossible. Volstok’s profound love for character animation and the ambition to make an immediate and deep connection with their audience.
Notable recent brands the studio has worked with include: Mitsubishi, Philips, Coca Cola and Mercedes.
LBB> How did you fall in love with animation?
Volstok> It was an accident. I swear. Coming from a sleepy town in Flanders I had no idea there was such a thing as art school. My ambition was becoming an illustrator, but I was intrigued by making stuff move over time. So animation was the only option after flunking illustration.
Once I was introduced to artistic short films I was shocked and perplexed about the possibilities of the medium and the emotional reactions it is able to provoke.
LBB>Tell us about the animation project that kick started your career in animation?
Volstok> A silly idea of combining candid camera footage with animated monsters, plus a tv production company willing to throw it on air. De Monsters was a 120 mini episodes and quite wild. It got featured on Motionographer and added to Vimeo’s Staff Picks. It was an excruciatingly painful and amateurish production, but SO much fun.
LBB> How would you describe your art style and what are your biggest inspirations that developed it?
Volstok> Personally I don’t care much about defining neither my style, nor calling it art: it’s all about the idea. As soon as I catch a good idea I like feeding and nursing it: to make it grow and see where it takes me. As far as inspiration goes, I like the darker stuff: Bukowski, Lynch, Nick Cave, Simon Hanselmann, Kirsten Lepore to name but a few. What ties them together is they can make you uncomfortable in the most comfortable way. Examining complex emotions and beauty in filth.
LBB> Show us your favourite or most impactful project that you’ve worked on - tell us, what is it that makes it special and what were the memorable moments or challenges?
Volstok> The Farmer of Club Brugge is still my favourite to this day: not only was this a bold creative choice from the agency to run with an artistic style for a football team, but it’s also a beautiful film in itself; crafted with lots of passion and love for our Flemish art heritage. The deadline was absurd, but it also pushed us to live and breathe nothing else but this production, and I can really say you can tell from the result.
LBB> How do you approach character design? What is your creative process like? Show us some of your favourite characters and their journey from notepad to screen.
Volstok> I started drawing quite late in life, leaving me with the feeling I need to make dozens of bad drawings to get to one good one. But they all serve their purpose in a way: I like throwing stuff in the bin to make sure I leave no stone unturned. It helps me with character design because you need to get the obvious out of the way before you get to the good stuff.
Playing with rough shapes and colours, blobs, sketches, pencil doodles and markers in my sketchbook until the perfect design reveals itself. We always design with several people from the creative team at Volstok to get a wider range, learn from each other, and come up with a design that feels like it was made by all of us. It not only connects the team, but it also generates a higher quality result.
LBB> Tell us more about observation and movement - what is the process you go through to study movement & performance of characters?
Volstok> My team will probably chuckle for sharing this, but I prefer acting things out in the studio. It’s by far the easiest way to show posing, timing, rhythm and exaggeration. By making a fool of myself I’m certain the intent of the actions are 100% clear before the animators run with it. Even for motion design productions you can find me gesturing, tapping my hands on the table or bouncing an invisible ball to visualise the dynamics.
From there, I trust in the expertise of the animator, leaving enough room for interpretation and adding their individual idea to the performance.
LBB> We all know of some ever-green adult animations, but lately they have definitely been on the rise, from Rick and Morty to Arcane. What sort of opportunities does this open for animators, both within and outside the advertising industry?
Volstok> It’s definitely amazing to see how these animations have found their way to bigger audiences. As a '90s kid I had to travel to festivals, order DVDs and VHS tapes from dodgy websites and copy videos from like minded friends to grow my collection of beautiful animated poetry and weirdness.
It’s a relief to see more quirky and inspiring work in advertising, as it’s an authentic way of standing out of the constant stream of content. To me it feels like animation itself has matured, is more widely accepted as a medium, and finally is accepted as a truly unique and impactful storytelling tool.
LBB> How does one figure out what kind of animation style or styles fits a particular story or project?
Volstok> This is where I constantly jump the line between personal and professional work: diving head first into the creative idea, developing a concept and pouring your heart and soul into it. Only to then take a step back and question if it’s the best possible style to tell the story.
There are times when the work gets ripped apart, but instead of taking it personally, I see it as a challenge to push myself and come up with a stronger concept. It’s tough, but it’s part of the process. Sometimes I have a particular style or combination of techniques in my mind that I just KNOW works, and I can feel some people on the team getting nervous. But it also keeps you on your toes, in a heightened state of creative production, and it usually takes a quick leap of faith to see if it lands on its feet.
LBB> What is your favourite piece of technology or software that you use and how does it help your creative process?
Volstok> My 27” Wacom Cintiq, no doubt. Take my drawing tablet away and I would feel completely helpless. It was such a game changer, coming from the analogue torture of animating with pencil on paper. No more scanning. Endless colours, pencils, brushes and layers. The Undo button! It completely revolutionised my workflow while still feeling that connection from my hand, to the pen and the canvas.
LBB> What sort of briefs or projects do you find more personally satisfying to work on? Is there a dream project that springs to mind?
Volstok> Projects that explore more complex emotional matter always make my heart beat faster. Animation is extremely powerful to tell stories about experiences that people carry close to their own hearts. You can tell a love story with only two dots that will make you cry. You can portray loss and grief. Make people feel all warm and fuzzy inside or get really personal in an instant. Or just be extremely silly.
I love how animation works perfectly in documentaries. It’s more than a creative playground: it makes memories visible again without the filter of reality. Like travelling inside someone’s memory.
LBB> What recent projects have really stood out for you and why?
Volstok> I adore Effie Papa’s work for Mailchimp × It’s Nice That – All In A Day’s Work because it feels very fresh, charming and almost effortless. It’s the lightness and craft that attracts me, while it’s also telling captivating stories. Also, animating stop motion would be a complete disaster for me, meaning I have tremendous respect for the craft.
LBB> Who is your animation hero and what is it about their work that inspires you? What example of their work particularly stands out?
Volstok> JJ Villard completely shook my animation world with Son of Satan back in 2003. We met shortly after graduating and drank beers at several film festivals across the world. His work is crude, unhinged and bursting with energy. It looked like a sketchbook that complemented Charles Bukowski’s short story perfectly. Suddenly it dawned on me that animation could be so much more than carefully scripted stories and elegant design moving smoothly at 24 drawings per second. There lies tremendous power in rawness.
LBB> Outside of the field of animation, what really inspires you?
Volstok> Skateboarding and surfing. It might sound lame, but it’s a way of emptying the mind while being very technical at the same time. You need to think about a thousand things at once and simultaneously let go. It’s a ridiculously complicated form of play. But the reward is unmatched, and you meet a lot of inspiring, crazy people from all ages that you instantly connect with.
What are the biggest changes to animation and challenges facing animators at the moment and what are your thoughts on them?
Volstok> Absolutely no surprise here: A.I.
It is already disrupting the industry and while it's exponentially growing at an insane speed, I feel we still need to work out the why and the how we are looking at this evolution. It’s amazing technology, but there’s no filter on ideas anymore. I would almost say there’s even a lack of ideas. Effortlessly prompting and generating without asking questions and seeing if you like the result long enough for a double tap.
When I pick up a pencil to sketch, I need to have some kind of certainty, a motivation to put in the effort of actually drawing it. I also enjoy the process of creation, why would we take that away? As a tool, we are already using it at the studio to speed up our workflows and expand our possibilities, but it’s very clear we need to adapt to this evolution and use it to evolve as a creative studio.
LBB> Any advice you would like to give to aspiring artists?
Volstok> Pick up a pencil. Seriously. I hear so many people saying they didn’t learn to draw. They don’t know how to draw hands or faces. Well guess what? There’s no secret. It’s learned by practice. So suck up 100 badly drawn hands before you get to a decent one. Learn something from every line, every scratch on paper because it doesn’t just come magically. The physical act of drawing is also very liberating, interesting and it sparks the imagination.
LBB> Tell us about your partnership with A.R.C and your plans together looking ahead A.R.C produce 2D, 3D, stop frame and live action - how open are you to exploring new animation techniques or storytelling mediums on this next chapter?
Volstok> Ben and Alex are ambitious people with a thirst for high quality work and an eye for exciting animation. They operate from their gut and that’s exactly why we connect so well. So far, I feel there’s a respectful creative partnership with only one goal in mind: making truly exciting work.
As I said before, I love experimenting with styles and techniques, mixing 2D with live, 3D, 2D… whatever! They know I enjoy being a catalyst for a creative idea, and I can really disappear in the depths of a project, but they also know I’m not patient enough for stop motion, haha!
