This week our Moho Featured Artist is Artem Kmet and his project NYC Jewellery Week 2020! 🔥  Artem uses Moho as his main 2D animation software ✨ 

Tell us about yourself

 
I got into animation when I was a school kid. But I started working as a professional animator only 7 years later, after graduating university, when I was invited to join the pree-school show production team at the Kyrgyz Teleradio Corporation in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. That was the first time I got acquainted with Moho. It was our software of choice because it was the only software to provide us with the production speed we desperately needed back then. We produced 15 to 20 minutes of mixed media in a week. And such Moho features as quick and intuitive rigging, auto-lipsync, particles and built in camera were crucial for us.

Later I worked for several animation studios as an animator and director mainly for pre-school animated shows. I also worked as a freelancer creating infographics and animated explainer videos for different non government organizations as well as some personal projects. My current place of work is Plumus Animation Studio based in Minsk, Belarus. Our studio produced 2d animation for Animaccord (Masha and The Bear), Toonbox (Kit’n’Kate), Dasha The Cow Songs For Kids and now we are working on our own animated show for kids Loodleville.

Where do you get inspiration?

I like to watch great examples of animation similar to what I do frame-by-frame figuring out how it is done. As I am mainly a self-taught animator this helped me and still helps a lot. I also get inspiration from good movies and TV shows. My wife, Stasya Sokolovskaya @stasyasokolovska who is a talented traditional artist, inspires me as well. We did several projects together. Her watercolor paintings inspire me to make small animations based on them. In these small pieces I try to reimagine the story of the still image and build a new continuity of actions that will create dramatic development needed for animation.

What’s your hardware setup?

My work computer is equipped with an Intel Core i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM and Nvidia GTX 1050 graphic card. I also use a Huion Inspiroy Tablet that I bought after my good old Wacom Intuos 4L died. I am not a tech person and since the work that I do is not that resource consuming, I am not that into having fancy hardware setup. But what I absolutely adore from my setup is my wide LG 34WK500-P monitor. I don’t like using two monitors and to find this one was a great thing for me.

What do you like best about Moho?

Moho is very easy to learn for a quick start. Its interface is clean and intuitive. Of course over time you get more experienced with the software and find that additional knowledge of its tools and workflow helps you more and more. But even at the basic level it is fun to work with. I also like that for me personally it takes very little time to deal with rigging and you can proceed to the most interesting part - to animation. But the best thing for me about Moho is that if you did all the rigging right and assigned all small tweaking to smart bones, once you start animating, you don’t need to deal with anything but bones, timeline and keys. Having pre-made animations for a character written in Actions is great for a low budget production because you can combine them in different order to quickly produce decent “talking head” animation.

How has Moho helped you in your creative process?

I simply know that Moho gets me covered! When I plan out future animation, especially when it is bitmap image based, I know that I will find an appropriate tool to master almost any challenge that I face. That helps a lot to think creatively and not to overthink technical aspects of production.

What’s your favorite project made with Moho?

One of my favorite projects made in Moho is a promo for 2020 New York Jewelry Week that I produced with my wife. We were given full creative freedom but were little short in time. The whole production took less than 4 weeks. My wife made beautiful hand drawn watercolor illustrations that I later turned into animation.

Would you consider Moho an industry tool?

Yes, I think the software is great for studio productions. For animated TV shows where you need to have a rig capable of doing many things, nice and quick camera work and an ability to sort background layers by depth it is a software of choice for me.

Where can we find you?

My Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/artemkmet
My Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/myskeletonboy
Stasya Sokolovskaya Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/stasyasokolovska