Apex List

Tag: Motion & Video

  • Good Bandit spins out Bandit Animation — a bet that craft beats the feed’s slop

    After two years of growth, Auckland creative studio Good Bandit has launched a dedicated animation studio, Bandit Animation, built for creative agencies and internet-native brands.

    The launch is a bet on craft. As the studio puts it, feeds are filled with slop and audiences want more — work that feels like a person made it. Bandit Animation makes hand-made, thumb-stopping work designed to feel at home on the feed.

    The spinoff is not starting from zero. It already holds an ongoing production partnership with US tech company Patreon, crafting podcast shorts, brand animation and paid campaigns, and its portfolio includes work for Answer in Progress in partnership with TED Audio Collective, plus collaborations with Australian and New Zealand agencies including Bastion for clients such as Whittaker’s, Genesis, Spark and New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

    Co-founder Chase Madsen frames the move around how the internet itself has changed: “There’s more output than ever, but the brands actually reaching their audience are building on authentic cultural resonance, not just slick visuals.” The studio offers both campaign-based commercial production and embedded retainer models for brands that want a consistent visual presence across internet-first channels.

    For independent teams, the move itself is the story. A spinoff brand lets a small studio sell one clear service — internet-native animation — to agency partners and marketing teams, without diluting the parent studio or asking it to be everything to everyone. Specialise the offer, keep the parent broad.

    See the work at banditanimation.studio, and read the announcement at Campaign Brief NZ.

  • A veteran trailer editor launched a new agency he can run from the edit bay

    Joshua Rogers, a veteran creative advertising executive who previously worked as VP and creative director at Zealot and Buddha Jones, has launched Gravity, a new independent agency built around the craft of film and TV campaign work.

    The founding team is small and senior by design: editors Matt McCrory and Brent Howard, producer Patrick Dirks, and creative director and editor Kazadi Katambwa, who previously worked with Rogers at Buddha Jones and spent three years as Lead Creative at Amazon Studios, managing campaigns for The Peripheral, The Power, Shelter and The Expanse. Katambwa’s earlier work with Rogers at Buddha Jones included campaigns for Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, Mad Max: Fury Road and the entire Dark Knight trilogy.

    Rogers says the motivation was deliberately anti-scale: “I wanted to build a company that I could run from the edit bay, not from a big office or a Zoom window.” The model is deep immersion in the source material — the team aims to be of service to the intellectual property itself, adapting to each client’s brand DNA and working as an extension of the client’s internal creative department.

    Gravity has already put the model to work, contributing to promotional efforts for season 13 of American Horror Story and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and handling the theatrical rerelease of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

    For independent teams, Gravity is a useful counter-example to the growth-at-all-costs agency story: a launch that treats seniority and craft as the product, not headcount. The bet is that clients with major IP would rather buy a small team that disappears into their story than a large one that processes it.

    Source: Ungrid Now — “Creative Ad World Gets New Edge: Rogers Launches Gravity”

  • A record label’s rebrand started in a car — and that is the whole point

    Some rebrands start with a mood board. This one started with a car ride.

    Milkshake, the Stockholm record label and artist management firm that operates as a division of Sony Music Entertainment, was named during a drive — the founding group pitching names while talking about their favourite drinks. In the years since, cars became the label’s unofficial studio: vehicles were where the team previewed, pitched and assessed unreleased demos in motion. So when Vienna-based STUDIO HERRSTRÖM was asked to give the label a more structured identity for its next phase of growth, it built the system from the thing that was already true: car culture, drink flavours and pop music, fused into one visual language.

    The original splash mark has been redrawn as a rounded, blended emblem, keeping the kinetic energy of the original while working cleanly across everything from single artwork to corporate communications. The palette pairs saturated beverage cues — neon pinks, high-vis yellows — against asphalt blacks and soft lilacs. Information lockups borrow the functional layouts of car window permits and milk carton nutrition tables, giving track titles, launch dates and copyright lines their own dedicated containers. Gates, a neo-grotesque typeface from Contextype, holds the editorial frame together.

    Creative director Erik Herrström sums up the brief in a single image: “We wanted to create an identity that feels as fresh as that first sip of your favourite milkshake that you just picked up going through the drive-through.”

    What makes this one useful for independent teams is the discipline of it. The studio did not invent a story and drape it over the client; it found the story the client was already living — demos judged from the driver’s seat — and gave it a system that scales. A small studio rebranding a growing client faces the same temptation every time: to make the work bigger than the business. Herrström did the opposite, and the identity is stronger for it.

    Source: Design Week, published October 14, 2026, updated October 28, 2026.

  • Laika spent five years and 230 puppets on Wildwood — and said no to AI

    Laika, the Oregon stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, has released Wildwood, its first feature in seven years. The film opened in theaters on 23 October 2026, and its director, Travis Knight, used the moment to draw a hard line: he called artificial intelligence “antithetical to everything that we are at this studio,” as reported by Emergent.

    The numbers behind the film explain the stance. The production took five years and more than 230 individually sculpted puppets, including 36 different versions of the protagonist Prue, each built for specific scenes and emotional beats. Every frame was photographed by hand, with animators physically adjusting puppets between shots. The film adapts the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, and it arrives through Fathom Entertainment, a smaller distributor than the majors that handled Laika’s earlier films.

    Early box office suggests the bet is holding up: Comic Basics reports an opening Friday of about $4.3 million, close to the studio’s past openers, with an A CinemaScore and a 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. TheWrap, cited in the same report, puts the budget well above $100 million, so profitability is a much harder test than opening weekend.

    Why it matters to independent teams: Laika is treating slowness and handcraft as a market position, not a nostalgia trip. While larger animation houses adopt generative AI for pre-visualization and texture work, Laika is betting that audiences can feel the difference — and will pay for it. That is a useful frame for any small studio deciding where to stand on AI: the question is not whether to use the tools, but whether the tools are part of what you sell. If your value is speed and volume, AI is leverage. If your value is the human fingerprint, saying so out loud — and pricing accordingly — is the strategy. Wildwood’s run will be the first real test of which side of that line audiences reward.

    Sources: Emergent, “Laika’s Wildwood Director Rejects AI in Stop-Motion Film”; Comic Basics on the opening weekend.

  • Two dots gave a festival a face — without stealing the artists’ spotlight

    Berlin’s Pictoplasma festival has spent two decades keeping its own branding quiet so the artists’ characters could take centre stage. Its new identity, designed by Vilnius-based andstudio, finally gives the festival a face — made of just two dots.

    The identity is built on type. The studio adapted the Melun typeface with the foundry, adding a glyph for a pair of eyes, so the wordmark itself reads as a face: letters for the body, two dots for eyes. Nothing is drawn on top, so the mark never becomes a full character competing with the work on show. Colours and layouts change per city edition; the type and the dots stay constant.

    Motion designer Greta Griniute built a motion identity from the same two elements, and the system extends to cheap, physical touches: two holes cut into festival tents, dots stuck on objects around the city as a guerrilla campaign, and a flash tattoo booth offering a single design — two dots.

    The rebrand launched with the 2026 Berlin festival, and tickets sold out six weeks before the event — earlier than usual, which for a festival working with shrinking cultural budgets means more time to plan the next edition.

    Why it matters to independent teams: restraint is a strategy, not a compromise. andstudio resisted the obvious move — a big mascot — and built a system a small team can actually run: type it, dot it, done, in any city, on any budget. When your brand has to share the stage with your clients’ or community’s work, designing less can be the bravest call.

    Source: Creative Boom, “Two dots give Pictoplasma a face in andstudio’s rebrand” (October 14, 2026)